ACTION RESEARCH

1. ACTION RESEARCH Barbara Tarrant Lester B. Pearson School Board How can I improve my practice to enhance student learning?

2. Action Research … A tool to help you to better understand your educational practice and to make ongoing improvements

3. Action Research … A form of inquiry designed to improve our teaching by using professional (informed) eyes to observe our own practice. We collaborate with others, including our students, to enhance the power of our learning. And we face the challenges we meet with action and analysis, sharing the result for the larger community to critique.

4. Combined Action and Research ACTION: exploring the possibilities of better ways of acting, ways that may result in a better teaching situation for ourselves, and a better learning situation for our students RESEARCH: (systematic inquiry) collection and analysis of data as evidence that our actions are effective

5. Action Research Planning Acting Reflecting Observing

6. The Action Research Funnel Study of Literature and Research (External Information) Study of On-Site Data (Internal School Information) Decisions Actions Enhanced Education for Students Healthier Workplace Norms for Adults Emily Calhoun, 1994

7. Characteristics of Action Research • Ethical commitment • Cycle of reflective practice • Collaboration • Made public

8. Why do Action Research? • Deals with our questions, not someone else’s • A way to gain a greater control over our teaching practices • Leads to better teaching and better learning • Builds strong collegial relationships

9. I now believe that action research is as much a process of asking questions about one’s practice as it is about deciding what to do about solutions. Action research enables you to live the questions; in a way, they become the focal point of your thinking. Battaglia, 1995

10. Types of Action Research • Individual • Collaborative • School-wide • District-wide

11. 1. What is my research interest? With a critical friend: • Explore a curiosity or problem • Explore a critical incident Critical incident – something that happened. Stands out for you because it was problematic, confusing, a great success a terrible failure, or it captures the essence of what you are trying to achieve.

12. Now state your question: “How can I ...?”

13. My Interest • Journaling • Student writing journals (Lucy Calkins) or writer’s notebooks (Ralph Fletcher) • Student’s writing remained between the covers of the journal, caught in a cul-de sac.

14. My Question How can I help my students draw on the writing they have done in their journals to improve their crafted writing?

15. 2. What will I try out in order to improve my practice? Brainstorm some strategies with a critical friend • Are these ideas reasonable and manageable? • Do they have the potential to address the problem?

16. My Action Plan • Three writing activities designed to force the children to draw on their journal writing • Support to independence scaffolding through instructional modeling

17. Three Writing Activities • Students kept a Christmas journal. They crafted a report on their holiday based on selections from their journal. • Students did a journal free-write on their memories of the Ice Storm. They used the free-write to craft a poem. • Students reread their entire journal viewing the contents as beads for a crafted text, They crafted a found poem from rich words and images uncovered in their journals.

18. 3. What information will I gather and how will I gather it? • What are some of the ways you have used before to gather information about your students? Your teaching? Your classroom? • In relation to your question, what do you want to know more about? • What tools will you use to collect this information?

19. Information I Needed • Are students able to understand the potential of journal writing as a means of improving crafted writing? • What support do students need in order to use their journals as a writing tool?

20. 4. How will I verify that my judgments are trustworthy and credible? Use multiple perspectives and methods to verify what you are seeing.

21. My Data • Professional journal • Classroom records • Student work • Student reflections • Student surveys • Tape-recorded interviews • Single case study

22. 5. How will I interpret the data? • Look for patterns that repeat themselves • What is still missing? • What do common sense and intuition tell you? • Validate your claims with a group of critical friends

23. Claim #1 Structured opportunities to use journal entries as a prewriting tool facilitates students’ ability to construct an understanding of how journal writing can be used to improve crafted writing. “If I continue writing I can look back in my journal and take some ideas to put them into a new idea and that idea can become another idea going on for ever.”

24. Claim #2 Modeling, by teacher, peer or expert, is understood by the students to be a means of facilitating their ability to produce crafted pieces of writing based on journal entries. “I got ideas from my teacher by her doing it [the assignment] in front of the class. She did the same things we had to do and that helped us.”

25. Claim #3 Verbal dialogue between students and teachers as fellow writers during the crafting process facilitates students’ ability to write effectively. “Sometimes my classmates read out loud and gave me ideas and good describing words to use.”

26. 6. How will I portray what I have learned and make it public? • Portray: stories, oral presentations, dramatic presentations, artistic rendering, formal write-ups • Make Public: professional portfolios, faculty meetings, school board meetings, websites, conference presentations, educational journals

27. My Sharing • International Teacher Research Conference in Magog, April 1999 • Summer Institute, Lennoxville, July, 2003 • Lead and Pilot School Conference, 2004

28. Good Resources • Hubbard, R.S. and Power, B.M. (1999). Living the Questions. York, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers. • Hubbard, R.S. and Power, B.M. (1993). The Art of Classroom Inquiry. Poertsmouth, NH: Heinemann.