Action Research in Practice

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Action Research in Practice

• Anthony Malone
• Geraldine Mooney Simmie
• TL21 Team

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Aims

• Teaching and Learning for 21st Century, TL21
• Action Research
• Keeping Reflections
• Portfolios of Learning
• Critical Friend Collaboration
• Some Pitfalls

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Action Research seeks to.

• Create understanding
• Evaluate in pursuit of change
• Determine practical actions
• improve practice rather than to produce
  knowledge (Elliott, 1991)
• Pursue, in tandem, action (change) and
  understanding

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Key Questions

• Describing What do I do?
• Informing What does this mean?
• Confronting How did I come to be this
  way?
• Revisiting What happens when changes are made?

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Action Research

• Exercises a tension between
• At its best involves a creative moment of
  transformation.
• An imaginative leap from world as it is to
  world as it could be.

Evaluation of Development
Evaluation for Development
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Keeping Reflections

• The Learning Cycle
• To do
• To reflect
• To theorise
• To try anew

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Keeping Reflections

• The Reflective Practitioner
• Awareness of ones own intuitive thinking usually
  grows out of practice in articulating it to
  others
• Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner, 1983
• Learning Paradigm
• Invitation to Let Go!
• Authors of your own work

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Keeping Reflections

• Process of Systematic Reflection
• self-evaluation is much more meaningful when
  those at the receiving end are also at the
  creation end, discussing and formulating what is
  important to them
• The Self-Evaluation File, Mc Beath J. (2004), 5.

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Portfolios for Learning

• To examine
• Process Reflect on
• Fusion Understand
• Product Explain
• Develop professional
  practice.

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Portfolios for Learning
A Purposeful collection of teacher and/or
student work that exhibits development in one or
more methodologies in one or more areas of the
curriculum. It is a self-reflective collection of
work (materials and Methodologies) generated
during the process of instruction. It catalogues
the strategies employed in the teaching and
learning process. Its not just a
miscellaneous collection of stuff. Nor
intended as some form of therapy session. It
should give evidence of professional
growth/development. It should have a central,
controlling idea.
O
P
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Portfolios for Learning

• Suggestions
• Actual teaching activites
• Appropriate examples of students work
• Purposeful samples of Reflective Writing
• Reports
• Examples of work using ICT
• Audio/Video Recordings

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Critical Friend Collaboration

• Support and Challenge
• Creating a climate of trust
• respect and confidence

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Critical Friend Collaboration

• Re-framing
• Teaching Learning
• Hunting the Assumptions (S. Brookfield)

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Critical Friend Collaboration

• Qualitative Research
• Classroom School-based
• Analysis of findings
• Blend Theory with Practice

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Some Pitfalls
Time!!
Risky Business
Confusion
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Conclusions

• How is this year going to be different from last
  year?
• How do we work together including all pathways of
  accreditation?
• In what ways do we advance leadership and
  learning so they they get onto your school
  agendas?

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Conclusions

• What do we look out for in the year ahead?
• How do we continue to ensure a mutual concurrence
  between the aims of TL21 and your aims as
  professionals?
• What can be done so that challenges and pitfalls
  are overcome?