Action Research Plan

Goal: Research if mandatory home visits are a helpful tool to student’s classroom success.

Action Items:
1. Identify which 6th grade boys will be part of the sample group of at risk students.
2. Meet with the 6th grade team of teachers describing to them the research project and the purpose of it
3. Meet with the students, parents and teachers within the first two weeks of school so everyone is on the same page
4. Home visits by teachers every six-weeks.
5. Survey to be completed by parents, teachers and students at the beginning, middle and end of the school year.
6. Monthly evaluations for students, as well as TAKS test and district testing to follow improvement of students.

Persons Responsible:
Mary Slocum (action plan researcher), administrator
Core 6th grade teachers, Mary Slocum
Parents, Students, Teachers, Mary Slocum
Core 6th grade teachers, Parents, Students
Parents, Students, Teachers, Mary Slocum
Teachers, Mary Slocum

Timeline (Start/End):
Start: August 2010
End: June 2011

Needed Resources:
Student’s TAKS scores
“At-Risk” list from elementary schools
Core-teachers willing to make continuous home visits
Data from test and survey results

Evaluation:
Students, parents, and teachers will complete the final evaluation/survey at the end of the year detailing their feelings of the program. There will also be data to analyze from district and state wide tests that will be compared to students in the same demographic from other grades, and other schools.

Week 2 Reflections

This week I was able to view 3 interviews with administrators while they discussed their views on action research and tips on how to use it in the best way. It was very helpful for me to hear from people who are putting the theories into action right now and how they see the effects of their research. It became more apparent to me this week than it every has before that this is about accountability, and to keep yourself accountable you have to always be up todate on what is best for your school.

The nine wonderings of school leaders was also very insightful. I know all of those things are problems that administrators have to deal with. However, I was not aware of all the different ways to look at it and use action research to help those different topics.

Action Research Discovery

Action research is something that I was not familiar with until this class started. I just assumed that research was research, all done by professors or people who had been in the field for alot longer that I have been. Now I realize that action research can and should be used by all administrators. Active research is when an administrator engages in a systematic research plan that applies to their own administration. Administrators think of questions/issues that can be improved upon by research. This research is on going and ebs and flows with the administrator. There is a big difference between action research and traditional research. Action research relies on the administrator to determine their own research goals, collect data, and come up with a solution from the research. Traditional educational research is when administrators use outside research from experts to solve their problems. This often causes administrators to focus on problems instead of solutions. I think action research can be very helpful at low performing schools because they can look at high performing schools and anayzle their data and practices to set up an improvment plan. For example, my school just changed from a learning center to a comprehensive middle school and our scores dropped. We could use this action research idea to study other schools who have gone through the same thing and see what they did and did not do to improve.

Educational leaders can use blogs in many useful ways. It helps administrators create a real learning communitee in which they can grow and learn from each other. If I am blocked for where to look next in research or can not think of a different way to view problems my counterparts can help me via my blog.