WEEK 4

REVISED ACTION RESEARCH PLAN

The purpose of this action plan is to audit the way our school and district handles staff development and to devise a plan to increase interest, participation, collaboration, and enthusiasm with regard to attending and presenting staff development sessions. The focus of this research plan will be the teachers that have to sit through ineffective staff development after staff development and never take anything back to the classroom to be implemented because they never got any time for active engagement and collaboration within core groups or PLC’s to see how the staff development material would work within the scheme of what they are doing within there classrooms.
Questions that will be researched:

1. What can be done to make staff development more interesting, fun, and effective for teachers?
2. What types of activities were done within the last 2 years that made teachers willing to participate and have fun?
3. How much time needs to be built into the staff development for collaboration amongst core groups or PLC’s?
How can this staff development be implemented into the classroom?

SCHOOL VISION: NFHS: Making EXEMPLARY students, one student at a time.
GOAL: To devise a plan to increase interest, participation, collaboration, and enthusiasm with regard to attending and presenting staff development sessions.
OUTCOMES: Staff developments that are interactive
Increased teacher participation
Increased teacher collaboration
ACTIVITIES: Pre-Staff development blogging
Activity based presentations which include blog concerns and opinions
Staff development topics: Blogging for Communication, Brain-Based Learning, Shaping School Culture: NFHS Finding Its Identity, Vertical and Horizontal Teaming, Using Technology to Implement SKYPE Lessons, TAKS vs. End of Course, Block Schedule vs. 8 Period Day
RESOURCES/RESEARCH TOOLS NEEDED: Teacher feedback: The blog
Research successful staff
developments
Staff Development Committee
RESPONSIBILITY TO ADDRESS ACTIVITIES: Administrators advising and giving support
Teachers giving feedback
Committee interviewing teachers
TIME LINE: 2010/2011 school year Approx 1-2 staff development per 6 week period
Benchmarks/ ASSESSMENT : Staff development evaluations
Implementation of staff development into classrooms
Revisions to SIP/PIP based on monitoring and assessments: Additional staff developments have been written into the SIP

WEEK 3 EDLD 5301

ACTION RESEARCH PLAN AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

My Action Research Plan has changed since last week to, “Improving Staff Development.” The purpose of this action plan is to audit the way our school and district handles staff development and to devise a plan to increase interest, participation, collaboration, and enthusiasm with regard to attending and presenting staff development sessions. The focus of this research plan will be the teachers that have to sit through ineffective staff development after staff development and never take anything back to the classroom to be implemented because they never got any time for active engagement and collaboration within core groups or PLC’s to see how the staff development material would work within the scheme of what they are doing within there classrooms.

Questions that will be researched:

1. What can be done to make staff development more interesting, fun, and effective for teachers?

2. What types of activities were done within the last 2 years that made teachers willing to participate and have fun?

3. How much time needs to be built into the staff development for collaboration amongst core groups or PLC’s?

4. How can this staff development be implemented into the classroom?

SCHOOL VISION: NFHS: Making EXEMPLARY students, one student at a time.

GOAL: To devise a plan to increase interest, participation, collaboration, and enthusiasm with regard to attending and presenting staff development sessions.

OUTCOMES: Staff developments that are interesting

Increased teacher participation

Increased teacher collaboration

ACTIVITIES: Fun and active icebreakers

Activity based presentations

Meet with teachers detailing past issues and plans to help

RESOURCES/RESEARCH TOOLS NEEDED: Teacher feedback: what would be fun?

Research successful staff developments

Staff Development Committee

RESPONSIBILITY TO ADDRESS ACTIVITIES: Administrators advising and giving support

Teachers giving feedback

Committee interviewing teachers

TIME LINE: 2010/2011 school year

Benchmarks/ ASSESSMENT : Staff development evaluations

Implementation of staff development into classrooms

Revisions to SIP/PIP based on monitoring and assessments: As an intern, I will work directly with an administrator while planning and implementing staff developments

Lessons Learned From Week 2

Action Research

I learned from Dr. Briseno that we don’t have to ‘recreate the wheel’ or suffer unnecessary headaches struggling with a problem that has already been solved. Before we go into this process of struggling, we should first do some research and see if someone else has had this particular problem before us and discover what they did to solve it. I also learned from Dr. Chargois that research is not always about introducing a new project that we feel will work for a particular demographic student group. It can be used to discover how to teach our teachers to be more data driven. One more thing that I learned from Dr. Chargois is a simple way of creating an action research topic is stating the Effective vs. the Ineffective.

BLOGS AS ACTION RESEARCH / HOW EDUCATIONAL LEADERS CAN USE BLOGS

Action research has become cutting edge research as we have learned to disect our educational strategies in an effort to make ourselves better, more efficient, and effective educators. Our leaders can use BLOGS to record their action research and share with one another. I forsee a time when I, an administrator, come upon challenges within my building and need to hear from another administrator that has had a similar issue. I could go to my blog site and type in my issue and within hours, I have several responses that can be used as research to effective practices within my situation.

I can also see administrators creating a blog site to simply record our reflections of of our situations. This site could be used as action research simply by looking to see if anyone else has gone through what I am going through as a means of helping me to make adjustments based on earlier successes that my peers might have had.

ACTION RESEARCH

Action research refers to the process of me, an administrator, studying my daily administrative practices in an effort to be more effecient, effective, or simply better. Once these practices are studied, then I, the administrator, take action for change based on the results of my desired research. This is why, as educators, we often study ‘best practices’ within our own arenas. After these studies, we then determine what we can use, from the studied information, to make ourselves better, more efficient, and maximizing our growth. Action research is done from within the research community which is a direct contradiction to Traditional Research which is done from outside the research community. With action research, I would perform a study based on what I do and practice as an administrator. This, in turn, makes the research more realistic for me and I become a collaborator within my own research by being an investigator of my own problems and situations. There is no better collaborator, with regard to critiquing my situation, than me because I can be 100% honest with myself. (Honesty is a major requirement within action research.) As an active participant in my research process, I too will be more willing to accept the changes that need to be made for the betterment of my administrative practice.

WEEK 5 REFLECTIONS

Upon entering the EDLD 5352, I knew that my skills in technology were weak. Being 46 years of age, I had run from technology, and the use of it, for many years and thought I had finally come to a dead end. This course meant that I had to finally ‘face the music’ as it relates to my technological fears. My expectation was that I would now learn how to use computer technology in ways that I had yet to master. This course far exceeded my expectations. I not only learned about the hardware regarding technology, but I learned how to develop an extensive Long Range Plan for Technology. I was able to peak into the future by learning more about the present. I learn that I couldn’t see where I was going until I recognized more about where I was at.
Through the study of different types of technology such as blogs and sites such as ‘Slideshare.com,’ I learned different ways in which I not only could use technology, but also integrate it into my classroom. In learning how to blog, I was first afraid of creating my own blog site because it seemed too complicated for me. When I dove into the assignment though, I found that it wasn’t that tough at all and I found Slideshare to be pretty fun to use to upload things to my blog site. I now use my blog page to communicate with my students by posting assignments to it that they normally couldn’t get to. All they need is internet access and now they can see their assignments online. I also use my technology in my classroom more effectively to make my classroom a fun place to be for my students and myself.
Since I am still a teacher, I found it very hard to grasp this course from the perspective of an administrator. If I had any disappointments, I would say getting a true visual form this perspective was an outcome that I did not achieve. I would need more time to do this and study in more detail. I would like to have more time to practice what I am learning from an administrative perspective, but I feel that this course was trying to get as much information forced into us as possible in a short period of time. This made my assignments more focused on mowing down mountain-like tasks than having the fun of enjoying what I was learning. I spent more time meeting deadlines than having the enjoyment of learning and practicing new things.
Being a math teacher and head coach, I am very task oriented so there was not an option with regard to whether or not I would be successful in carrying out my course assignments. I must add that I was very discouraged in doing them because there was so much to do in so little time to do it in. Maybe it was because I also have to teach, plan lessons, and am in the heart of my basketball season. There was nothing enjoyable about this course other than the idea of the potential of what I learned and how it could be used in my classroom. We got an email stating that we still should enjoy the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas but I thought that was a joke because I was too busy completing tasks for Brighton. Maybe I’ll enjoy Christmas but these last few weeks have been about pacing myself more so than learning.
This course helped me to learn a lot about myself!!! I felt that I was pushed to the limit and had to maximize my time management skills. I learned that sometimes, things don’t have to be fun and learning is not always going to occur in a course to the extent we want it because the requirements of the course don’t allow it. This is a course that will not end this week because there is so much more I want to learn about blogs and wikis. These two avenues of technology really caught my eye and have intrigued me. I learned that I still know how to get things done when they need to be done because it’s my job. I learned how to keep my attitude positive towards the course and Lamar because I didn’t think you had any regard for our professional and family lives, but business is business so no hard feelings. I learned how valuable technology can be in my classroom and look forward to it’s integration into the curriculum.
Blogs will be revolutionary to me with regard to how I teach and use them in my classroom. I’ve already showed my students how to blog and they use it to help one another through their assignments. They post a ‘blog problem of the day’ on to my school blog site and get extra credit for it. I see them having fun doing it because it is computer (technology) oriented and they can use their creativity in the way in which they feel they can express themselves. In being this creative, they are developing a better foundation for concepts within my classroom and subject area. I see my class averages going up as we give mini and common assessments and my kids are having fun while they learn. Blogging has been revolutionary in my classroom. My kids are learning and having fun doing it. They actually have kids chiming in on their sites form other schools. Blogging has created a whole new learning community on the net!!!
One of the main concerns of blogging in my classroom is that I can’t monitor their sites because it is too many of them. Everything on these blog sites, that I’ve showed them how to create, is not clean and I have to stay clear from them in a sense because I don’t want to be held accountable for bullying or misconduct within the blogs. Another concern is that my students can’t edit within the blogs. They can only reply back and forth which limits the true creativity. I would like to see them edit, but I think this would be more suited to being a Wiki. Wikis allow us to post things that can be edited and for that reason alone , I think Wikis will soon surpass blog sites. I also fear that our student creativity, while on district issued laptops, will have their ideas claimed by the school district because it was done using their property.
I can use blogging to be very beneficial to reach out to all stakeholders by way of the internet. It can potentially take the place of conference calls and meetings because I can see myself posting an issue and allowing my stakeholders to post their comments and opinions with regard to how they feel about the issue. It will allow everyone to see what everyone feels and expound on their different opinions. I must also be aware by not just posting an issue and leaving it unattended because I must referee by making sure opinions are respected and don’t turn into arguments. We must all know how to agree to disagree and not bully one another by forcing our opinions onto one another and monopolizing the blog.

EDLD 5352 WEEK 4 ASSIGNMENT

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

EDLD 5352 WEEK 4 ASSIGNMENT

View more documents from RICHARD ENSLEY.