Thursday, September 12, 2013

#seaccr What is Action Research?


Action Research is a process of collaborating with colleagues and administrators.  It is a time to reflect on immediate practice and what tends to work well and what needs to be changed or discontinued.  It is important as a teacher to reflect on each lesson given to students. Reflect on what went well during the lesson, what took away from students’ learning, and what could improve their students’ learning.  Action Research works best when each student reflects on his or her learning experience. Grade level teams or the whole staff at a school can collaborate and find new implementation strategies during Action Research. There are five specific stages with Action Research:

1.     Problem Formulation
2.     Data Collection
3.     Data Analysis
4.     Reporting Results
5.     Action Planning            

When I think of Action Research, I think of the Student Support Team. When a teacher refers a student to SST, the teacher explains the problem, takes data on the student, and brings the data to the meeting. The committee looks over the data, and gives immediate and practical feedback. The teacher is required to try the new interventions and report the results back to the team during the next meeting.  If nothing has changed and there is still a problem an action plan is created.  The student is either referred for special services or the interventions are changed. This process is Action Research.




http://seaccr.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/becoming-a-teacher-leader-through-action-research.pdf

2 comments:

  1. I like your comparison of action research and the sst protocol. I was a chairman of and sst for 10 years and I got to know that pattern really well. I remember that I felt like the best thing I could do for the team was keep really good records so that we wouldn't lose track of a child's progress. Interestingly, the better we kept the records of interventions, the more likely we were to be effective. I'm sure that action research will be the same way. Thanks for your comments.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I, too, thought the comparison to the SST was interesting. I never thought of it this way. The action research model is really a basic problem solving model. I think another key is to incorporate outside data and research into the data collection phase of the action research process.

    ReplyDelete