Action Research and Professional Development

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Action Research and Professional Development

• Margaret Farren
• Computer Applications
• Dublin City University
• Presentation to Masters in ICT in Education,
  Trinity College, Dublin.
• February 2002

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Personal knowledge is the most precious gift in
the life of a (wo)man. Polanyi (1958,
1975)
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Outline of session

• Pair work activity
• Action Research cycle
• What is Action Research?
• Context Developing teaching and learning
• Methodologies
• Kemmis
• Whitehead
• Case study
• Web resources and bibliography

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Pair work

• Part one
• One person talk to partner about something in
  your teaching practice that you have worked on to
  improve.
• Other person listens to see if they can
  understand what the values are that are
  motivating them to improve.
• Feedback from pair work.

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Pair work

• Part two
• Focus on claims made about improvement.
• Focus on kind of data required to enable you to
  make a judgement on the effectiveness of the
  actions taken.

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What is Action Research?

• Practitioner based research
• Systematic enquiry made public
• Improving student learning
• Developing teacher as learner
• Enquiry made public
• Values/criteria in Action Research

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Why do Action Research?

• Living our values/criteria in our professional
  practice you need to be clear about what you
  are doing and why your are doing it.
• Empowering us as teachers to bring about
  improvement. (Praxis versus techne.)
• Teaching as a form of enquiry, leading to
  knowledge and understanding of practice.
• Developing awareness of practice by being
  critical of practice.
• Helping to bring about a more participatory/collab
  orative view of teaching and learning.

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Kemmis model
Cyclical model of action research
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How to carry out an Action Research study

• Cyclical or spiral process which alternates
  between action and critical reflection
•  Continuously refining methods, data and
  interpretation in the light of the understanding
  developed in the earlier cycles.
• An emergent process which takes shape as
  understanding increases  it is an iterative
  process which converges towards a better
  understanding of what happens.
• Participative (among other reasons, change is
  usually easier to achieve when those affected by
  the change are involved) and qualitative.

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Basic steps in action research

• Review current practice
• Identify aspect worth investigating
• Imagine a way forward
• Try it out
• Take stock
• Modify in light of what we find
• Monitor
• Review
• Evaluate

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How to do Action Research?Whitehead Living
educational theory

• Whitehead (1989 ) formulated action reflections
  cycles into these statements
• What am I concerned about/what do I want to
  improve
• What am I going to do about it
• What data will I need to collect to enable me to
  make a judgement on my effectiveness
• Act and gather data
• Evaluation of effectiveness
• Modification of concerns, ideas and actions in
  the light of evaluations
• Submission of descriptions and explanation of my
  learning in the educational enquiry, How do I
  improve my practice? to w validation group.

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Criteria/values

• Goals cannot be separated from values.
• The things you believe are important (values)
  become your criteria.
• In the process of clarifying the meanings of your
  embodied values, as they emerge in practice your
  transform your values into your criteria
  (standards).
• You can share your living standards with others.
• They are living because they can change during
  your enquiry.

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Criteria/values

• To show that you are living your values in
  practice you must produce data to meet the
  criteria. When these pieces of data meet the
  criteria they become evidence.
• Evidence is used in your research account when
  you make w claim that you have improved learning.
  

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Living educational theory

• Two processes involved in following these
  steps
• Systematic actions as you work through steps
• Your actions embody your learning and your
  learning is informed by your reflections on your
  actions.

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Living form of Action Research

• Questions of the type
• What am I doing?
• Why am I doing it?
• Give a living form to an educational enquiry.
• How do I improve what I am doing?
• How do I live my values more fully in my
  practice? (Whitehead, 1993)

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Validating the enquiry

• Collecting data
• Analysing data
• Synthesing data
• Validation
• Learner
• Self
• Peer

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Link to Action Research Case Studies

• My Homepage
• Action Research studies and artefacts
• WebCT Discussion forum