9 Areas of Passion

This week, we learned about the 9 areas of passion that can drive an action research inquiry.

1.    Staff development

Benefit – Increasing the retention of teaching professionals by satisfying the need for support and keeping teachers fresh and vibrant in their classrooms.

2.    Curriculum development

Benefit – Since curriculum is such a major influence on student achievement, having a superior curriculum is vital to leading a successful campus where relevant, engaging lessons are being taught.

3.    Individual teacher(s)

Benefit – If it is PEOPLE, not programs, that determine the quality of a school (Whitaker, 2003 – as referenced in Dana, 2009) then one can only draw the conclusion that helping teachers to stay engaged in the profession, learning and thriving and growing, will be a huge benefit to the campus and most importantly, to the students.

4.    Individual student(s)

Benefit – When you find ways to help individual students become more successful, your campus as a whole becomes more successful.  Also, it provides students with a community where success is the expectation.

5.    School culture/community

Benefit – Since a school’s culture undergirds everything teachers and students in a school building say and do, shaping a positive, supportive, success focused culture is vital (Dana, 2009).

6.    Leadership

 

Benefit – By helping teachers to thrive as leaders, administrators demonstrate and live the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership (Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, Encourage the Heart) (Kouzes & Posner, 2002- as referenced in Dana, 2009).

7.    Management

 

Benefit – Since a principal’s managerial role is all the planning, organizing, operating, executing, budgeting, maintaining, and scheduling that are required for the process of education to occur – keeping a balance between leadership and management is important and critical to ensure success. 

8.    School performance

 

Benefit – Since we live in the reality of a trickle down environment when it comes to school performance, the only way to prove student success (at least to the district, state, and federal government) is through an increase in school performance (or higher TAKS scores in Texas!).

9.    Social justice or equity issues

 

Benefit – If we truly want our students to succeed in life outside our school walls, we have to best prepare them for a world that will not give them breaks or make allowances for their background.  We must teach them ways to rise above and hold themselves to a higher standard.

   

Educational Leaders and Blogs...

Educational leaders can and SHOULD be using blogs.  Present day students are digital natives.  Their parents are digitally savvy as well.  As a means of communication, educational leaders should take advantage of this technology.  A note home may or may not make it past the schoolhouse door, but an email that goes directly to a parent's smart-phone has a pretty high rate of success of getting read by the parent.  The leader might actually get a response fairly quickly, depending on the parent’s availability.

Our educational partners are also tech oriented.  I would much rather get an email or a text message from an associate than have to wait for a letter delivered by the U.S. Postal Service.  Chances are high that it would get lost or delayed or delivered to the wrong address.  Mail that is sent to our district’s central office can take quite some time to make it to its destination.  Electronic communication though is nearly instantaneous.

Blogs, or any other form of electronic communication, give the audience the opportunity to go back and read the information provided when it is most convenient to them as well.  24 hours a day, the blog is available.  This helps to reduce the challenges faced by miscommunication.

How Can I Use Action Research??

An administrator can use action research to investigate and try to solve most issues on his or her campus.  I plan to use action research to try to solve an issue we are experiencing at my academy.  We are in a unique situation in that 70% of our student population comes from the home campus on which we are located.  However, the other 30% are selected from middle schools throughout the district.  There are 13 middle schools in our district.  It is possible that we would have students from every one of those middle schools.  We are responsible for transporting the student from his or her home campus to our magnet program. 

This can be a daunting task when one considers the severe congestion on the main highways in a town like San Antonio.  Our city grew faster than the infrastructure that supports it.  As a result, getting our students bused from the Stone Oak area into the Nimitz area has been an issue.  The students have been arriving on campus 15 – 20 minutes after the bell for the commencement of first period has begun.  Our classes are 45 minutes long.  This means that these students have missed a minimum of one-third of the instruction for their first period class.  For the majority of these students, first period is a core class (Math, Science, English/Reading, or History). 

Another issue is that the students arrive at their home middle school too early to get breakfast there, but arrive too late to get breakfast on our campus.  This is a serious issue because some of the bused students are on Free/Reduced Lunch (meaning that we provide breakfast for them for free or a reduced rate as well).  For those students, they may not get any breakfast at home because they are impoverished and we are failing to provide for them on campus due to a transportation issue.

I plan to use action research to try to come up with a viable solution to this problem so that our students are served both educationally and nutritionally.

What is Action Research??

I certainly won't pretend to be an expert on what we call action research or administrative inquiry, but I am learning about it through my course on Research at Lamar University (Master of Education in Educational Administration).

As a requirement for this course, students have been asked to read Nancy Dana's Leading With Passion and Knowledge: The Principal as Action Researcher.  I was somewhat confused at first, but once I started the reading, I gained a better understanding.  

I learned that administrative inquiry or action research can be defined as a process that principals (or other administrators) work through using systematic, intentional studying of his or her own practices, then basing their actions or decisions on the knowledge that the administrators gain as a result of the process (Dana, 2009).  It appears that the author uses the terms administrative inquiry and action research interchangeably, so I probably will as well.

Action research benefits include: theories and knowledge that are grounded in reality; collaboration by the practitioners in the investigation of problems; increase in the facilitation of change due to the direct involvement of the practitioners in the research process (Dana, 2009).

Action research differs from “process-product research” in that it is not performed by “outsiders”, but is in fact performed by the principal, teachers, and students that are directly impacted on a daily basis.  The researchers become the problem solvers.  It increases the likelihood that everyone from the principal down will “buy in” to the proposed solutions.  Often, districts will try a pre-packaged, fit-all solution only to discover that it doesn’t work in all schools.  This is especially true if there are significant differences across the district.  When you have affluent schools with ample resources and Title I schools with limited resources, the same solution cannot necessarily be successfully implemented in the same way on the different campuses.

Administrative inquiry differs from qualitative studies in that the researchers’ roles are not limited as they are with qualitative studies.  Again, “outsiders” are not the people collecting, studying, and analyzing the data.  Those tasks are performed by the people who have a direct need to solve the problem.  Action research highlights the role of the practitioners as “knowledge generators” and allows focus on the concerns of those involved instead of those from outside (Dana, 2009).  Sometimes a problem has different roots at different levels of education, even within one campus.  The behavior problems seen in a sixth grade classroom are often completely different than those seen in an eighth grade classroom, therefore one “bottled” fix-all may not be the best way to address the behavior issues as a whole.