Week 2 Reflection

This was a great week of information. I thought the interviews from the three administrators offered great insight on how to motivate your faculty and to offer suggestions to their teachers on how to conduct action research. I thought the information that Dr. Chargois shared was very important regarding how important it is for teachers today and those in college and/or teacher preparation programs begin to realize that they need to make sure that they are cognizant of the data that is being produced and to work together to find solutions.

I am interested to see where my topic will lead me: Increasing Parent support in the high school setting to increase to student achievement, and to search through the data that has been found so far regarding this topic. I know it will lead to something very positive for my campus or maybe it will steer me to something else entirely that I never thought of. The success of this project will be the journey not necessarily in the destination. We shall see.

Educational uses for blogs

I intend to implement blogs for my classes this school year. In addition to this, as department chair, I plan on implementing blogs for our science teachers as well. I think that it would be awesome if our school had a blog and be able to talk to the principal or assistant principals about incidents that happended, upcoming events, good things that happened or were witnessed. I am very excited about this.

Action Research

We have all been to that training where we listen to the researcher stand at a podium and begin to talk about his latest research for the next three hours. They begin with a joke that isn't funny and they fumble through their very dull and unattractive PowerPoint switching back from slide one to slide ten and then back to one. Please don't send me back there... there is so much I could do with those three hours that would positively impact my classroom.
Action research, or administrative inquiry, has now put the power into the hands of the educator and has given some real authority in making decisions that affect their own classrooms. Following the steps that are presented in the text, Leading with Passion and Knowldege by Nancy Dana, educators can now focus in on an issue that is affecting the campus and begin to find practical and research based solutions to these problems. But what makes Action research so much more approachable is that this can then be presented to the staff by the very people that produced the results, the teachers and staff for that campus. The cycle then continues onto a new topic/issue/concern and the school takes responsibility for their own problems and searches to seek real solutions.