Teachers thinking like researchers: nurturing research mindsets through a teacher-researcher master’s course

Research-based initial teacher education promotes inquiry-oriented professionalism, yet many teachers continue to perceive research as academic and disconnected from practice. Despite sustained policy emphasis on research-based ITE, limited empirical evidence examines how course-level pedagogical design reshapes teachers’ orientations toward research over time. This study investigates how a Teacher-Researcher Master’s course supports the development of teachers’ research mindset, conceptualized as an integration of cognitive understandings and action-oriented dispositions toward research. The course positioned inquiry as a staged, practice-embedded problem-solving process rather than as methods instruction alone, and as an entry point into inquiry practices aligned with action research. Using a qualitative, action-research–informed interpretivist design, the study draws on 544 pre- and post-course reflections and three focus groups across three academic years (N = 272). Findings show a shift from viewing research as distant and technical toward understanding it as classroom-embedded and professionally meaningful. Participants developed broader conceptualizations of research, greater inquiry confidence and agency, and emerging teacher-researcher identity orientations. Differences by career stage were observed, with stronger identity internalization among student and novice teachers. The study provides process-level evidence of how research mindset develops within a course-based intervention and advances research mindset as a lens for understanding how teachers become prepared to engage in inquiry-oriented and action research–informed practice.