Action Research in Practice

1. Action Research in Practice Anthony Malone Geraldine Mooney Simmie TL21 Team

2. Aims Teaching and Learning for 21st Century, TL21 • Action Research • Keeping Reflections • Portfolios of Learning • Critical Friend Collaboration • Some Pitfalls

3. Action Research seeks to…. • Create understanding • Evaluate in pursuit of change • Determine practical actions • “…improve practice rather than to produce knowledge” (Elliott, 1991) • Pursue, in tandem, action (change) and understanding

4. Key Questions • Describing:What do I do? Informing:What does this mean? & Confronting:How did I come to be this way? • Revisiting:What happens when changes are made?

5. Action Research Exercises a tension between: At its best involves a creative moment of transformation. An imaginative leap from world “as it is” to world “as “it could be”. Evaluation of Development Evaluation for Development

6. Keeping Reflections The Learning Cycle • To do • To reflect • To theorise • To try anew

7. Keeping Reflections • The Reflective Practitioner Awareness of one’s own intuitive thinking usually grows out of practice in articulating it to others Donald Schon, The Reflective Practitioner, 1983 • Learning Paradigm • Invitation to Let Go! • Authors of your own work

8. Keeping Reflections Process of Systematic Reflection • “self-evaluation is much more meaningful when those at the receiving end are also at the creation end, discussing and formulating what is important to them” The Self-Evaluation File, Mc Beath J. (2004), 5.

9. Portfolios for Learning * To examine Process * Reflect on Fusion * Understand Product * Explain * Develop professional practice.

10. Portfolios for Learning “A Purposeful collection of teacher and/or student work that exhibits development in one or more methodologies in one or more areas of the curriculum. It is a self-reflective collection of work (materials and Methodologies) generated during the process of instruction. It catalogues the … strategies employed … in the teaching and learning process.” It’s not just a miscellaneous collection of “stuff.” Nor intended as some form of therapy session. It should give evidence of professional growth/development. It should have a central, controlling idea. O P

11. Portfolios for Learning • Suggestions • Actual teaching activites • Appropriate examples of student’s work • Purposeful samples of Reflective Writing • Reports • Examples of work using ICT • Audio/Video Recordings

12. Critical Friend Collaboration • Support and Challenge Creating a climate of trust respect and confidence

13. Critical Friend Collaboration Re-framing • Teaching & Learning • Hunting the Assumptions (S. Brookfield)

14. Critical Friend Collaboration Qualitative Research • Classroom & School-based • Analysis of findings • Blend Theory with Practice

15. Some Pitfalls Time!! Risky Business Confusion

16. Conclusions • How is this year going to be different from last year? • How do we work together including all pathways of accreditation? • In what ways do we advance leadership and learning so they they get onto your school agendas?

17. Conclusions • What do we look out for in the year ahead? • How do we continue to ensure a mutual concurrence between the aims of TL21 and your aims as professionals? • What can be done so that challenges and pitfalls are overcome?