During this course I learned the fundamental difference between regular research and action research. This difference was that research in general simply means to find out more about a particular problem, while action research deals with finding out about a problem and looking for a solution to that problem. It also involves thinking on a deeper level and reflecting on what you are doing before, during and after the actions are completed.Dr. Arterbury mentioned in the week 1 lecture that action research requires a systematic approach in both collecting and analyzing data in order to solve a problem and I can see that in my upcoming research as well.
During the discussions on the discussion board I found that many of my colleagues were interested in the same topic of discipline as I was because we felt that it had a big impact on learning in and out of the classroom. In fact Bryan Green who writes the blog Learning@www... (http://wbryangreen.blogspot.com) is quite concerned with the problem of the repeat offenders and what can be done to help those students channel their energies towards learning instead of being disruptive. One of the activities he suggests for improving discipline on his campus is to visit other campuses to see what they are doing and then take the successful strategies back to his campus. I think this is a great idea because although it can be a bit daunting to see what someone else is doing at first, it gives you great insight on things that you may not have thought of trying. I am going to use this strategy as well, instead of just trying to look for solutions from my own campus because the variety of experiences should yield better solutions to our problems.
In the week 4 lecture Dr. Jenkins mentioned that individual learning was the slowest form of learning which was really surprising to me since I prefer to do my work individually. He stated all the benefits of cooperative learning and those were exemplified when we all posted to our blogs and learned so much from the different perspectives of people on different campuses and even different districts. We really were able to come up with more suggestions for solving our individual problems when everyone worked on it as a group because we were able to offer a fresh perspective.
This week I learned the ways to assess my research by using the Quality Indicators listed on pages 179 through 183 in the Dana text.Dana, N.F. (2009). Leading with passion and knowledge: The principal as action researcher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. These five steps really help to assess every step of the action research so that you can know if you are making progress or not towards actually finding solutions to the problem area. The thing I like the most about those steps is that they force you to really reflect on what you are doing as you are doing it so tat you can make adjustments as needed before getting too deep into the research and then realizing that you are on the wrong track.
