Action Research Week 1

What I've learned about action research and how I may be able to use it:

Action Research is something that I think all good educators engage in unwittingly; thinking about a problem in a critical area of instruction/process, researching the problem, collaborating with others who are may be involved or have insight into the situation, and creating a contextual solution that in the end, enhances student performance and learning outcomes.  In all actuality, action research could be used in other contexts besides education, however, in the educational setting it is a process that that is reflective, evaluative, and helps build on prior experiences to grow and change as an educator or administrator.  I appreciate the term "administrative inquiry" used in the Dana text.  Making an inquiry into a topic is much more accurate than doing "research" in a library or based on those studies from outside organizations.  The people who know the most about the topic being researched are those who are there in the trenches everyday, carrying out those best practices and witnessing the results of changes first hand.  I imagine that it must be satisfying as an administrator to evaluate and reflect upon practices during a school year, collaboratively create programs to address problems and then watch them come to fruition through your own campus.

I'll be able to use this currently during my internship to assess the needs of my campus and improve on an area I feel is a critical need for my school.  One of the areas I've begun to look into is vertical alignment between subject levels, especially in 3rd through 5th grade.  It is very common for the grade level teams to stay independent and not communicate with each other about strategies they are teaching from year to year  in order to make things more cohesive for the students as they move from one grade to the next.

Blogs:

Educational leaders should be able to use blogs in many contexts.  They could use it as a forum for teachers to discuss and provide feedback on classroom and campus ideas.  Also as a reflective practice it could be used monthly or weekly to give recognition to the positive things that happened on campus during that time period or maybe pose ideas for improvement.  A blog could definitely be used for a campus wide action research plan as well.  Because sometimes there is such a time constraint, it could be used as a tool to communicate about the progress of an action research project, and again as a place for teachers to give constructive feedback about the project as well.