EDLD 5301 Research for Teachers has taught me a great deal. When I read the title of the course, I assumed we would be reading many different forms of research and writing reflections or essays from what we had studied. I dreaded it. That is not how I learn. I was happy to see from the course overviews that the assignments were much more than that.
The new learning that really caught my interest was action research. I had no inkling of what action research was until I begin this course 4 ½ weeks ago. I spent time looking online at what others classified as action research. I read a few blogs from past Lamar students to get an idea of how they saw action research. Hence, by the time I had to begin creating my own action research plan and drafting my question/wonderings I was prepared because I had done some “research”. In one of the many meetings I had with my site supervisor, we discussed our campuses action plan, which I was surprised to see how closely the draft I was creating resembled our campuses action plan. The format, the wording, the criteria, etc. were relatively the same. For me, to see that what I am learning in my 2nd course of my Educational Administration Masters program was something that I will be applying to possibly a campus where I am a site supervisor one day, made that learning valid.
I would be careless to say that action research is not an area where I still want to learn more. I know that as the internship program continues and my action research continues, I will learn much more about the topic. I want to learn more about how to get more teachers involved in doing their own action research. If every grade level, once a year took a topic that was really an issue to them and their students, our campus would learn so much more about our students. Many times we think we know our students but in reality, we could know so much more. I would like to see how we could use that data to turn our campus into a true Professional Learning Community.
To continue building my understanding of action research, I am going to complete my action research study on the impact of afterschool tutorials on student growth and achievement. I also plan on keeping up with my classmates’ blogs to see how their action research plans are going. I will continue reading information online and in the text that was required for this course, but we did not read due to time constraints. After my initial action research study is completed for this internship program, I would also like to partake in more action research that I think will benefit my campus. When choosing a topic for my action research study for this course, I brainstormed many ideas and a number of them my site supervisor felt would be of interest to our campus. I hope to be able to delve into those areas after the current action research is finished.
On another note, I am in the process of setting up the initial introduction of my action research plan to the faculty. That should be happening within a week or so. I have already been collecting data because so much is shared with the entire campus when benchmarks are done. I'll post more next week on the initial introduction and how that plays out!
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