The focus this week was refining the action research topic previously selected last week. I did quite a bit of reading...textbook, blogs, discussion boards. Interesting ideas out there! I even signed up for a free trial of EBSCO, an educational research website.
I am looking forward to putting my idea into action!
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Blogs for Administrators
Administrators could use blogs in many different ways, but staying in touch with parents comes to my mind very quickly. Once familiar with authoring a blog, an administrator could widely distribute the blog address and have immediate output to many parents. I think this would be very well received by middle and high school parents who so often hear that school was "fine" or "nothing is going on" from their child. A simple blog about upcoming open houses, or asking for more parent involvement in the lunchroom would be a quick and very effective way to keep parents feeling in the loop with their child's school.
Action Research Summary
After much reading on action research versus traditional educational research I believe the main difference is the involvement of the person implementing the plan prescribed after the research. In traditional educational research, educators and administrators often adopt a plan or approach to fix a problem based entirely on outside research. This is usually a broad based study of a situation and the campus culture, environment, and defencies may be quite different than those studied. Regardless, the decision is made to adopt a particular set of rules or methods based on data driven results and the plan is implemented with very little if any input at a local level. In contrast, action research involves the administrator, or other educator in a much more intimate capacity. The administrator is the author of the problem and utilizes all available resources, as well as outside research, to attack and solve the problem. This solution will directly address the needs of the campus and the solution to the problem is widely shared and implemented.
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