Action Research AS professional development - some tales from the field

Presenter: Vince Ham / Strand: Professional Learning Communities / Theme: Professional Learning Communities / Target Level: All

In this workshop participants worked in groups to share experience of action research practice. I am a complete novice when it comes to research so it was a listening exercise for me.

Action research involves circular process of:

Act

Observe

Reflect

• Action research is generally done to improve a teachers own practice rather than to increase the knowledge base.
• Action research is about your own practice - you cannot action research others.

Steps involved in action research

1. Puzzle - raising reading levels, improving class discussion etc
2. Process - running records, journals, questionaries etc
3. Conclusions
4. Presentations - cluster share, publish paper etc

ICTPD clusters are encouraged to adopt action enquiries and action research as the model of professional learning .