Excited! As I watched the videos for this week and read the sections from Action Research: Improving Schools and Empowering Educators, this is the best way to describe how I felt.
Throughout my time in the DLL program, I have developed an innovation plan for my campus with most of my work to this point focusing on the overall picture of implementation and presenting my information to stakeholders. After engaging with the information this week, however, I was able to gain knowledge of one of the most valuable tools I can use as I prepare to present my plan to stakeholders, action research.
Action research is similar to traditional research in that it can be utilized in the education field as a way to improve teaching methods and learning for students. Also, they both involve observing an existing issue and employing various methods to identify possible solutions for that issue. Unlike traditional research, however, action research is focused specifically on our personal learning environments. Rather than conducting research on a broader issue using outside populations, action research targets a specific issue within our own classrooms or on our campus that we feel needs to be improved. This quality of action research may help my innovation plan resonate more with colleagues on my campus because the issue of student engagement and grades that I aim to address with my blended learning plan is a problem that many teachers have witnessed and/or expressed themselves in some capacity. By conducting hands-on research in our own learning environments, we are also able to utilize more reflection than we would conducting traditional research with a population that we do not personally serve on a daily basis. This reflection helps us to become more effective teachers because it keeps us aware of the quality of our teaching. It puts us in a rhythm of constantly looking for and thinking of ways to improve our teaching practices.
As I begin conducting action research for my blended learning classroom I feel like I have a relatively good starting point. In addition to developing an implementation plan I have also determined lead and lag measures that will help keep track of the activities that will help me reach my wildly important goals (WIGs) and let me know when I have reached them, respectively. Having already identified vital behaviors and lead and lag measures can assist me during my action research planning by providing me with ideas for where to narrow down the focus of my research and tools for how to measure the effectiveness of my plan. In my earlier DLL courses, I have also written 2 literature reviews in which I have researched close to 30 resources on my topic. I think this will help me out greatly by already providing me with multiple primary sources for assessing implementation strategies that may work for my blended learning and project-based learning as well as those that have not had as much success. I can also utilize the secondary resources mentioned on their references lists as a more efficient way to acquire more sources.
Although I feel pretty excited to delve into this aspect of my implementation plan, I can see myself possibly encountering some difficulties when I get to Step 5 (Implementing the Plan and Collecting Data) in the Acting Stage. To gauge the effectiveness of our plan, we have to utilize a variety of qualitative and quantitative measures during this stage. With my blended learning innovation plan, I think the quantitative measurements will be relatively simple to collect by using daily work, assessments, and interviewing students. However, I think it will be more difficult to acquire variation in qualitative data. So far, I have thought of observing students and taking notes of what I see. If you have any other ideas of ways that I acquire both qualitative and/or quantitative data, please feel free to share. I am open to all suggestions.
Reference
Mertler, C. A. (2020). Action research: Improving schools and empowering educators (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
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