ACTION RESEARCH PLAN

This Week in Action Research Land

I think the word of the week for me is CONNECTIONS. I have been amazed as I "researched" what to research how many different ways things are connected. Teacher morale is connected to how empowered they feel. Empowering teacher leaders can positively impact student performance. Too often student performance is negatively affected by discipline assignments. The ramifications of change in one small area can be huge!
During a phone conversation with my assistant principal, we discussed how to close achievement gaps with some of our low performing students who often are at the lower socio-economic end of the spectrum. As we discussed different ways to address the gaps, we kept coming back to the same problem - what do you do about the students who are in ISS or another alternative assignment for discipline? This same issue kept popping up, so we decided that my action research project should focus on discipline and effective alternatives to ISS assignments. Both of us felt that if we could effectively discipline students without negatively impacting their performance, then we would address so many other issues: from closing our achievement gap to teacher morale. It will be interesting to see what other schools have done or tried and even to see what teachers think will be effective.

Using Blogs in Education

The possibilities for blogs in education are as endless as the number of subjects and topics addressed by teachers! While I can see numerous benefits of a teacher and his/her students blogging, I had not truly considered the possibilities or implications of an educational leader using a blog.

I believe that blogs could be utilized by educational leaders in numerous ways. One example would be a blog for administrators and their colleagues. A blog monitored by the central office could offer networking, advise, and proposed solutions to problems or issues to new and even experienced administrators. There they could post reflections on readings sent out by the superintendent, answer each other questions and share the results of their own campus based action research. It could offer opportunities for collaboration that many administrators don't often have. A second way that blogs could be employed is as a means of communication with parents, and community members. Schools could have blogs that parents could follow that would contain important information and allow parents to network with each other. A third use of blogs by educational leaders might be the most important. School leaders could blog with their own faculty. This would allow for a free flow of ideas, questions, etc. Teachers could read current research and journal articles relevant to their courses, instructional strategies and even the schools action research question and participate in a professional dialogue with their colleagues and leaders making them more a part of the school's team.

Action Research - How It Can Be Used in Education

In order to understand how to use and benefit from action research in education, one must first understand what it is and what it is not. Action research is research that teachers and administrators engage in on their own campus and in their own classrooms. As researchers, they pose questions such as "Will requiring a homeroom/advisory period for all high school students improve our graduation rate?" Then the teachers and administrators set about gathering data in response to their question. Once they have the data, they study it and reflect on its implications in order to propose a change in their school or classroom. The main thing to remember about action research is the word "action." As opposed to traditional research models where "outside experts" come in and conduct the research and then leave, in action research, members of the school staff are the researchers. They are the ones taking action to address an area of need. They are researching questions that they want answers for and proposing changes that they believe will address their problems. In short, they have a stake in the outcome.

The use of action research, or administrative inquiry, in education can help educators and administrators to pinpoint areas of need, collect relevant data, analyze that data, and identify potential courses of action to address the needs. According to her book, Leading with Passion and Knowledge (2009), Nancy Dana contends that action research in education allows teachers and administrators to pose their own questions - relevant to their own school or situation - and through studying the data gathered when answering that question, propose and institute changes that are specific their circumstances. Also, because educators are the ones conducting the inquiry, they are more likely to see the need for and benefits of any changes. They have ownership in the problem, the solution, and the ultimate outcome.