Old Boring Research vs New Reflective Action Research

I must admit I was scared by the title of my new class, “Research”.  I was dreading reading long boring books by extensively educated professionals and writing reports about their research findings.  After this first week and learning about “action research”, I am excited to conduct research on my specific school and issues that I wonder about all the time here.  Action research is the process of doing a intention study of a practice, analyzing the data, and making change based on the results.  It seems to be a learning reflection and very useful. It pleases me to see educational research turning to this trend.  My school is member of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP).  We are taught weekly how to teach the students based on their rubric and are taught strategies to use with the kids that are created through action research and field based data.  Two main things I have learned through this program is giving a expectation at the beginning of each lesson and giving time for reflection at the end of every lesson.  Through these expectations and reflections, students own their own learning and connect concepts to other parts of school and their own real-lives.  I feel that action research will have the same effectiveness on us teachers and administrators.  Through our own reflection and changes made during action research we own are learning and are constantly expanding our knowledge base to best help our school and students.

 I am looking forward to the action research question I will be studying in this class because I have always been bothered by point and click software, I’ve wondered its actual effectiveness and worried about wasting such wonderful 21^st century technology tools on a drill and kill program.  I look forward to analyzing the data on these programs, finding the actual effectiveness, and coming up with a plan to change based on the findings.