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.