Probably the largest thing that I got from this course was that there is a difference between traditional educational research and action research.  I had never heard of action research before this class and would have guessed that it wasn’t different from any other kind of research.  Personally, the word research overshadowed the word action in this course and until I started working on the week one activities I hadn’t even considered what it might mean by “action.”  The only thing I’d ever thought about with research was reporting your findings to others in a paper or something similar.  I hadn’t ever really considered taking the results of research and putting into use to create change.

One other interesting thing to me was the strategy of force field analysis that I briefly mentioned in my week 5 discussion board posting.  Kurt Lewin “theorized that in order for change to occur, the driving forces for the change must exceed the resisting forces against the change” (Harris, Edmonson, and Combs, 2010).  At first glance, this seems like common sense because if you’ve got more things against you than going with you, then it seems it would definitely be harder to accomplish something.  However, there’s really more to it than that.  Once you’ve identified the forces that are driving and resisting the change, you have to then understand “the circumstances surrounding the needed change” (Harris et al., 2010).  Once you understand the forces around the change, then you have the task of determining whether or not the change is possible and if it is, what needs to take place to put it into motion.

Both the site supervisor and one particular comment on my blog have also helped me in this course.  When I first began the week one activities, I wanted to do my action research on a policy that our district initiated at the start of the second semester last school year.  I had full intentions of looking into “bring you own technology” and how it could be used and how it would benefit students.  However, after my first meeting with my site supervisor, we talked and decided to go another route because there was already being work done in this area.  So, he and I decided that it would be best if I did action research on how to increase parental involvement on the junior high campus and increase communication between parents and teachers.  I was feeling pretty good at that point because I thought I had a good topic that was set in stone!  Well, anyone who has gone through this course now knows that it’s not set in stone.  We’ve learned in this course, with action research, you have to be flexible to make modifications.  I met again a few days ago with my site supervisor and it just so happened that he had another person involved with administration and an outside consultant in his office for a meeting about planning for the next school year.  I joined the meeting and my action research topic was brought up and we all began to discuss different aspects of it.  After some discussion, we decided as a group that the topic was a bit too broad.  So, my action research has been more specifically narrowed down to “how can we increase communication between parents and teachers.”  In researching this, the goal is to include communication using technology such as Facebook fan pages for classrooms, texting services, and the district/campus website.  The comment to my blog that I mentioned was from a Ms. Dawn Walker.  She mentioned the use of teacher blogs to post lesson plans.  I’m not sure if we will use blogs or not, but the possibility can definitely be investigated.  I had not thought of incorporating lesson plans as part of communication between teachers and parents.  If you think about it though, it’s definitely communicating!  Many parents want to know what their children are doing in school and having the lesson plans posted on a blog or Facebook fan page would be a great way to communicate that.

I am very excited to be working on this action research over the next few months and hopefully making a positive impact on my campus.  I also want to mention, that even though the part about increasing parental involvement was removed from the action research plan, I am theorizing (because I’ve yet to look into any research on it) that parental involvement will be a positive side effect of increasing communication between our teachers and parents of our students.

References:

Harris, Sandra, Edmonson, Stacey, & Combs, Julie. (2010) Step 8 Examining the Work:  Sustaining Improvement.  Examining What We Do to Improve Our Schools 8 Steps From Analysis to Action.  Larchmont, NY:  Eye On Education