Guiding School Improvement with Action Research: Chapter 5-6

Chapter 5: Choosing the Right Research Questions and Assessment Criteria

Three Criteria for Project LEARN AR Topic
1. It involves an issue that is reachable by the teacher/researcher.
2. It involves moving subject matter, something close to the teacher’s heart.
3. It is something that needs to change.

Sagor’s specific instructions on using implementation strategies:

What: Keep a journal: Doctors can keep huge case loads and seem to know their cases very well, all because of their efficient use of a journal. Wouldn’t this be helpful with a teacher?

How?  Pledge to write for a min of 10 minutes in a researcher journal. Create a prompt for journal reflections. After two weeks, reread your journal to reflect on what patterns are emerging. Review the list of patterns or themes. Finally, ask if you are interested in any of the themes.

What: Engage in Dialogue:

How? Choose an interview partner. Choose your topic, limit your conversation to 20 minutes. Follow interview rules: interviewee is the talker, interviewer is to refrain from offering speaking, make choices random by flipping coins, at the end of 20 minutes reverse roles, at the end… ask yourself if it was all worth it.

What: Set Targets:

How?  With a partner, discuss your goals until you reach a shared understanding of your target, discuss the observable behaviors that you hope to produce on the basic, mid and top levels, assign them a 1, 3 and 5 respectively.  Once you have discussed and agreed upon the criteria and levels you have produced a rating scale that will help you measure the success of your efforts with a “dependent variable”.

Chapter 6: Using Theory to Drive Action

Implementation Strategys Continued

What: Build a Graphic Reconstruction

How: Brainstorm every important item about the problems with which you are concerned, write them all on post-it notes, rearrange the post its into a graphical representation of your problem, decide if you agree with the phenomona as illustrated on your map, if yes, you are done, if no you have to do it again.

What: Surfacing Research Questions, a process for isolating research questions worthy of further exploration.

How: Check your beliefs in reference to your map.  Do they still apply? Check your assumptions. Determine the importance of each variable, reltaionship and factor, by putting an ’s’ by those that are significant. Check your variables, relationships and factors, checking for unsureness.  Place a ‘u’ by those that make you unsure. Make your list of research questions based upon your list of ‘u’ and ’s’ questions.

What: The research Proposal/Problem Statement: a process fo ensuring focus for collaborative inquiry and/or explaining to colleagues what, specifically, the researcher (s) will be pursuing.

How: Answer the following questions: Who is affected by the problem? What is the nature of the problem? What is suspected of causing the problem? What, if anything, do you do about the problem? What is the goal for improvement?  What do you need or want to know about this problem. How will you go about getting the data to answer your reserach questions?

Action Research and Your Organization 1.27.2009

How can action research contribute to your organization?

I am very excited about action research and find that it is perfect for a community such as my work place.

To answer this question I turn to the Three Questions Posed by Action Researchers( as stated by Coghlan and Brannick):
1. What happened? The relating of the story.
2. How do you make sense of what happened? this involves rigorous reflection on that story.
3. So what? The most challenging question deals with the extrapolation of usable knowledge or theory from the reflection on the story.

Everyday there are situations where I see places that these questions would help identify and eventually solve a workable problem in our workplace.

One example concerns a story that I have related previously, so bear with me. The short version is that my TeamCrew Director does not see the reason to identify the performance objectives associated with our specific cutting method. This is troublesome because I am often tasked with relating to students why they did not do well on their assessment or why they have not been recommended for movement up through the team’s ranks. I clearly see a need to identify what our assessments are assign and how we know when someone has passed. She probably feels a number of things, first of all the fear of letting go of information that provides you with a job.

Asking myself the questions above would not only help me see things from multiple perspectives, but find a problem that could be studied and best practices identified. This would create (at least some) peace and harmony within our little world.

Action Research and Me 1.27.2009

Reflecting on the readings and your work, talk about how action research can contribute to you professionally.

It’s funny, but I found the Coglin and Brannock text much more helpful than the Sagor test on the merit that the tone of the latter book put me off a bit.  Usually it’s the conversational books that connect to my more conversational manner of learning.
That said, I was interested in the quote from page xxx of Coghlan & Brannick that states ““all good research is for Me, for us, and for them; It speaks to three audiences”.

I believe that it will be here that I begin to take a look around my professional life, looking to discover the subject of my semester studies.

I will obviously be the Me in this sentence, the “us” will be defined as my team and the Team (which are my co-workers and our SME team) and finally, because at the end of the day everything that we do is about selling the ‘poo, the “them” will be the stylist/barber community at large.

Brainstorm:  Things that are not good for Me, us and them currently…

• The sense of community: lacking because of the being short handed in the office and having such a large, geographically diverse population.
• Role clarity: sales folk have been “negotiating” rates, roles and expectations with our “team” for so many years that no one really knows who is certified to do what for whom when.
• A generally casual industry: The beauty industry is generally made up of a bunch of “over-share-ers”.  This stems from the fact that clientele is often built based on a word-of-mouth recommendations as well as a persona of “coolness”.  What I’m finding is that this leads to awkward corporate experiences for the HR guy, for me, but rarely for the Team Members.  As friendship and business often are blurry lines, this is an area where we have to work to develop our “folks” as to avoid a great big HR explosion.

Guiding School Improvement with Action Research: Chapters 1 & 2

Chapter 1: What is action research?

The Action Research Process:
1.    Selecting a focus: “What element/s of our practice or what aspect of student learning do we wish to investigate?”
2.    Clarifying theories: “What values, beliefs and theoretical perspectives the researchers hold relating to their focus?”
3.    Identifying research questions: “Let’s generate personally relevant questions to guide our inquiry”
4.    Collecting data: “what data do we have that will support that our actions are valid and reliable”
5.    Analyzing data: “what is the story told by this data, why did the story play itself out this way?”
6.    Reporting results
7.    Taking informed action

How is action research accomplished?
•    Step 1: Find a focus
o    Strategy 1: The Reflective Journal
o    Strategy 2: The Reflective Interview
o    Strategy 3: Analytic Discourse
•    Step 2: Clarifying Theories
o    The Priority Pie
o    Graphic Representation

Doing Action Research: Preface and Chapter 1

1. Action Research Defined by Coghlan and Brannick: An approach to research which aims at both taking action and creating knowledge or theory about that action.
2. Action research works through a cyclical process of consciously and deliberately: (a) planning; (b) taking action; (c) evaluation the action, leading to further planning and so on.  Action research is participative, members know that they are being studied and participate actively in the cyclical process.
3. Action research is appropriate when change is desired and that change is expected to be based on learning from existing processes.
4. Traditional research splits “action” and “research”, siting the difference between “researchers” and “practitioners”.  Coghland and Brannick give us a new term called “knowledge workers” which bridges the two terms.
5. Action Research Process (Lewin and Associates): diagnose a change situation/problem, planning, gathering data, taking action, and then fact-finding about the results of that action in order to plan and take further action.
6. Argyris’s 4 Themes of Lewis’ Work: integrate theory with practice and connects all problems to theory, designs research by framing the whole and then differentiating the parts, produced constructs which could be used to generalize and understand the individual case, changed the role of subjects to clients.
7. “all good research is for Me, for us, and for them; It speaks to three audiences.”
8. Three Questions Posed by Action Researchers:
9. What happened?  The relating of the story.
10. How do you make sense of what happened?  this involves rigorous reflection on that story.
11. So what?  The most challenging question deals with the extrapolation of usable knowledge or theory from the reflection on the story.
12. Kurt Lewin: Father of Traditional Action Research: Client and researcher work together to solve a problem while identifying new knowledge.
13. William Foote Whyte: Father of Participatory Action Research: Works to empower all to construct/use their judgement.
14. Reg Revans: Father of Action Learning: a group approach to action research where usable knowledge is the focus.
15. Chris Argyris: Father of Action Science: Applies Argyris’ “theories in use” theory to organizational defensiveness and organizational learning.
16. William Torbert: Father of Developmental Action Inquiry: action inquiry dealing with everyday life.
17. Co-operative Inquiry: focuses on research with people, working in groups focusing on issues that interest and concern them.
18. Clinical Inquiry: engages the training of those in the social sciences and social medicine to take an in depth look at organizational systems/learning/change which leads to a better understanding of the real dynamics of the systems.
19. Appreciative Inquiry: Based on the work of Cooperrider, focuses on what is already working and engages these systems as the focus of large scale change.
20. Learning History: Engages external consultants acting as repositories of organizational history collected from those embedded in the organizational change.
21. Reflective Practice: A critical reflection on the work of ones self.
22. Evaluative Inquiry: Attempts to use the process of inquiry to generate organizational learning.  Follows a traditional action research flow.

Writing Online Tutorials by Mr. Martin Tessmer

Reading Mr. Tessmer’s book on the creation of online tutorials was a real treat.  I was very impressed with the applicablity of his knowledge and the humor sprinkled throughout made the text very read-able.

Some of the things that I found important within the reading are as follows:

1. Online learning needs to be designe differently than a web page (which really shouldn’t be thought of as a “page” either).  We need to think of the visuable space as an environment, rather than something similer than a page.  This is based upon our usage of the space, of which the online and screen based environments are new.

2. The importance of modularizing courses: Tessmer tell us that “if all of your content is bundled into a single module, many learners will plow through all the content until they’ve reached it’s end point, regardless of module length” (Tessmer, p15).  It is important to moduleize per subject, to think about the natural breaks that will occure within the content.

3. Interactions are very important!  Tessmer reminds us that the main difference between a text and a tutorial is the way that the tutorial engages the learner.

4. The difference between practice and test items, as well as their relationship to each other.  Test items and practice items should match each other.  He also reminds us that practice questions and test questions should be developed differently.  Practice questions can have less distractors, they may be less carefully designed and allow learners to review content before they answer.

All in all I would have to say that this was a very helpful tutorial.  I really liked the points and found the text to be very applicable.

Tools of the week: Week 13 (11/10-16)

The Wordle Image of My Presentation Prowess Design Script

Thsrs and Wordle and ToonDoo
1. Thsrs is an online thesaurus, but rather than give you all options, it gives you the short words that are alternative to your submission.  Sort of cool, but really more a reflection on the ever pressing fight between meaning and space.

2. Wordle is a tool that I had specific interest in when I taught high school, now it seems a little like a toy.  The application to teaching high school is that I could take a student’s paper and show them what they had actually said.  Very often, one could take a paper, copy and paste it into the submission screen on wordle, and find out that the largest word (which is relative to the word most often used in the text submitted) was “like”.  Enough said?

3. Toondoo is a great website as well.  Essentially it is a social tool for the creation of imagry on the internet.  I do wonder, as I have not played with it much, if it is really necessary.  There seem to be a playground of really great drawing/imagry editing tools out in the Web 2.0 world and I just question the specificity of this specific tool.

Tools of the Week: 11/2-11/9

Jott.com: Turn your words into action

Jott makes sure you stay on top of everything. With a simple phone call to 866-JOTT-123, you can capture notes, set reminders and calendar appointments, stay in touch with friends and family, and interact with your favorite web sites and services…all with your voice!

Simply call Jott and tell us where you want your message to go. We capture your voice, turn it into text, and send it to the destination you chose.

Gliffy.com

Gimp.com: GIMP is a versatile graphics manipulation package. This page should help you get a taste of what GIMP is capable of. You can also have a look at our introduction page or browse through the tutorials.

Tools Of The Week: October 27 – November 2

Hey there,

This week’s tools of the week are:

1. http://www.ustream.tv/
2. http://bubbl.us/
3. http://www.esnips.com/

First, let’s talk about Bubbl.us since it is one of my favorite tools on the web.  You can see the chart below, that I build to get my ideas sorted for my latest presentation.  Really great app, social interaction is avaliable (although I have never used it).

http://bubbl.us/view.php?sid=170944&pw=yaqYUaoRlhDMINTgxMVVubVpqVm0vaw

YouStream seems to be a place where you can stream live video.  Would be very cool for an educational application such as having a live speaker or an interactive meeting.  Would have to see about quality of video, sound etc…

Esnips is a place to upload slide shows and videos.  The categories seem to be broken out into self expression; poetry, kareoke, photography.

Mutlimedia Learning: Richard E. Mayer

Richard E. Mayer is a leading reseracher and auther of materials regarding the use of multimedia in learning.  He is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) where he has served since 1975.

Mayer’s book, Multimedia Learning gives us insite into his processes for the following prinples and suggestions:

• Multimedia principle: People learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.

Principles for managing essential processing

• Segmenting principle: People learn better when a multimedia lesson is presented in learner-paced segments rather than as a continuous unit.
• Pre-training principle: People learn better from a multimedia lesson when they know the names and characteristics of the main concepts.
• Modality principle: People learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.

Principles for reducing extraneous processing

• Coherence principle: People learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded rather than included.
• Redundancy principle: People learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and on on-screen text.
• Signaling principle: People learn better when the words include cues about the organization of the presentation.
• Spatial contiguity principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.
• Temporal contiguity principle: People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.

Principles based on social cues

• Personalization principle: People learn better when the words are in conversational style rather than formal style.
• Voice principle: People learn better when words are spoken in a standard-accented human voice than in a machine voice or foreign-accented human voice.
• Image principle: People do not necessarily learn better from a multimedia lesson when the speaker’s image is added to the screen.

One last principle

• Individual differences principle: Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners. Design effects are stronger for high-spatial learners than for low-spatial learners.

References

Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia Learning
New York: Cambridge University Press.