Action Research Defined

I believe action research can and needs to happen at every level in the education process.  I think it is important that teachers (departments), principals, and superintendents/administrative district personal are all practicing action research to some degree.

      At the department level, department heads and the teacher’s within that department should be doing “practitioner inquiry” or “classroom research” that specifically involves their curriculum.  Questions such as, “What are some different methods that this problem can be solved.”, or “How can we change our delivery method to make our lesson more meaningful or clarifying for the students.”, are examples of action research at the classroom level.  The benefits of this “bottom level” action research may be the most important.  This research is what directly effects the students from day to day and is the “spark” that “lights the fire” in student success.  This calloboration amongst faculty in their departments in devising new strategies for student success is critical.

     At the campus level, action research takes place among campus leadership teams.  On our campus this is known as the “Building Leadership Team”.  This leadership team, consists of not only all three administrators on our campus but also selected faculty as well.  This leadership team addresses many different issues within the campus.  One topic that most definitely is action research oriented is our Campus Improvement Plan.  This topic was addressed as follows:

 Campus Improvement Plan (CIP):  Discuss in your departments—What are some areas that we want to highlight?  Engagement, transition and collaboration are main goals that we want to address.  Some areas to highlight are counselors’ meetings with all students, extra-curricular activity, electives, freshman orientation, Activity Fair.

Goal 1:  Some suggestions are Honor Roll, school web sites and other web presence, calendars, proactive student tutorials, proactive STAAR tutorials,  (promote academic success)

Goal 2:  work with district in monitoring attendance (encourage school attendance)

Goal 3:  Integrity, Eyas, Student of the Month (student recognition)

Goal 5:  special needs

Three broad areas that should be mentioned are including traditional and less traditional teaching methods, concept of collaboration and the seamless transition from middle school to high school.

This is a direct example of an action research plan at the campus level and is designed to “improve student learning by developing and refining the skills of teaching.”

     At the district level, an example of action research is an “inquiry-oriented learning community”.  In the Dana text, this is defined as “six to twelve professionals who meet on a regular basis to learn from practice through structured dialogue and who engage in continuous cycles through the process of action research.”  This type of action research I believe is most important in the 4^th phase of the action research model, using and sharing results.  When personnel meet at the district level, sharing results of campus initiated action research helps personnel on other campuses possibily incorporate this at their campuses.  I also believe it to be important that these committess/communities are made up of personnel that fill leadership rolls at different capacities within a school district (i.e. campus principals, athletic directors, lead counselors, district technology specialist etc. . .)

     All of these examples fall under the umbrella of instructional leadership which “involves implementing appropriate and effective curriculum, in a school, in collaboration with all stakeholders in the school.”  Student success is the back bone of all action research in education.

     From personal experience, I have been doing quite a bit of action research (although I wasn’t defining it this way until now) at the department level.  I hope within the next year (as part of my internship plan) that I get much more involved with action research at the campus level.