Sarah Fletcher

1
Sarah Fletcher

• http//www.bathspa.ac.uk/schools/education/cpd/

2
Mentoring is

• concerned with continuing personal as well as
  professional development (CPPD) and not just
  continuing professional development.
• Fletcher, S. (2000) Mentoring in Schools A
  Handbook of Good Practice London, Taylor and
  Francis

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Mentoring means

• .guiding and supporting through difficult
  transitions it is about smoothing the way,
  enabling, reassuring as well as directing,
  managing and instructing. It should unblock the
  ways to change by building self-confidence,
  self-esteem and a readiness to act as well as to
  engage in ongoing constructive interpersonal
  relationship. (Fletcher)

4
What is action research?How can I learn to do
it?How might it help me teach better?Why does
it matter if I teach better?What might
teaching better mean for for my students and
for my school?How can I contribute to the
profession of teaching by bringing a zest for
living to my own teaching?
5
What is Action Research?

• any systematic enquiry conducted by teacher
  researchers to gather information about how their
  particular schools operate, how they teach and
  how well their students learn. Action research is
  done by teachers for themselves it is not
  imposed on them by someone else
• Mills, G. (2003) Action Research a Guide for
  the Teacher Educator, USA, New Jersey, Pearson
  Education

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Action Research

• What matters most to me as an educator?
• How do I teach best and how can I teach even
  better?
• In my work as an educator, what is my main
  concern?
• How might I live my professional values more
  fully?
• What can I do to become a more professional
  educator by helping my colleagues to learn with
  me and to teach me?
• How can I help our students to learn better in
  our lessons?

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Action Research

• How can I collect data to evidence any claim that
  I might be improving my practice as an educator?
• How can I embody changes in my educational
  practice while systematically collecting data
  that I could synthesize into evidence to
  demonstrate that I am improving my work?
• How can I evaluate and then modify my practice in
  the light of the evaluations of my actions so I
  can improve what I do?
• How can I publicly validate and disseminate my
  claims to have improved my practice by living my
  values more fully?

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How might our kounai-ken be enriched by action
research?

• How do we explicate our own professional
  knowledge?
• How do we share what we know with one another and
  with other schools?
• How do we use what we know to improve our
  teaching profession?

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Why integrate mentoring in action research?

• Action research is formulaic when you restrict
  personal and professional interrelationships.
• Mentoring supports the explication of tacit and
  practical knowledge through focused questioning.
• Action research can sometimes be a solitary
  experience but mentoring builds supportive
  networks between collaborative researchers.
• Mentoring enables the growth of mentors and
  mentees professional skills, values, knowledge
  and understanding to promote better learning by
  teachers and by their students - working together.

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How do we improve kounai-ken with action
research mentoring?

• How might I represent my own practical
  knowledge and my own tacit knowledge?
• How might I help colleagues to teach more
  effectively by understanding their practical and
  tacit knowledge as well as my own?
• How might we share understandings about effective
  teaching with distant colleagues?
• (Asada, T. (2004) A Case Study on the Function of
  Kounai-ken for Teachers Professional Development
  in Japan, BERA, Manchester)

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Promoting and sustaining Japanese with English
abilities

• How might we use web-based technology to assist
  our own teaching-as-learning?
• How might we develop school websites to show and
  share our learning-in-teaching?
• How might we develop a Japanese and English
  teacher research website to disseminate
  teaching-as-learning and learning-in-teaching
  internationally?

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Sarah Fletcher

• http//www.TeacherResearch.net