One of the main things I have learned about action research is that it occurs on campuses and within campuses by people who work at that campus and know the particular issues faced by that campus. Basically, administrators and teachers have the freedom to become action researchers as they pursue a topic or question that pertains to their students or faculty. Action research is the process of looking at the situation and, as participants (administrators or teachers) pose questions about the best way to proceed, they are really in essence coming up with potential topics which may benefit from action research. In the action research process, they would formulate a clear question that is open-ended, rather than one with a yes or no answer. Next, they would look for ways to approach this topic of inquiry with more concrete assessment such as test scores or some other measurable data. Then they would follow through that inquiry process and gather the data or conduct the interviews necessary to find the sought-after information.
The thing that appeals to me about action research is that, in addition to concrete data, action research can use more informal measures such as questionaires or interviews. This interests me because I am more of a people person than a numbers or data person. In the past I have had a connotation that "research" means measurable numbers or hard and fast data. And while that is certainly a valuable aspect of action reasearch, it is not the only factor. I love to think that I would also be conducting action research as I seek feedback from campus personnel and students.
With what I have learned about action research I now know that I have already been participating in it at some level in weekly PLC meetings with my grade level and administrators. I will now be able to approach those meetings with a better grasp of what we are really doing and the impact that our inquiries and action research can have on our students. I can see myself building upon this further in an administrative setting and can really use what I have already learned from my principal in our PLC format to involve teachers in the process as well. The PLC incorporates action research so that it is part of the school week, rather than something in addition to already busy schedules. In this way action reasearch is already built in to the school week.
Hello Michelle,
ReplyDeleteResearch is a word that automatically ties to endless nights of looking up and retrieving data from published sources. I ,too, like the idea of being able to pull data from immediate sources that are actually affected by the situation at hand and hold that data valualbe!