Books & Materials

Action Research Reading 651 Fall

Required books

We will continue to read these books from last semester. It is best if you read them from beginning to end and then reread as we go along.

McNiff, J. & Whitehead, J.(2009) You and your action Research Project. (Version 3)

Kindle version

Reread Chapters 1-5

Coghlan, d, Brannick, T. (2009) Doing Action research in your organization.

Reread Chapters 1-7

AND....new for this semester is a focus on writing your literature review:

Swales, J. & Feak, C. (2004) Academic writing for graduate students. Ann Arbor: Michigan University press.

If you have never written a review of literature, you might find this book of value:

Machi, L & McEvoy, B. (2009) The literature review. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

These book will provide the theme of our discussions--what does it mean in your community of practice to engage in progressive problem solving? If Carl and Marlene were to rewrite this book today, how would it be different?

Other books that you might find helps you with your action research:

Perkins,D. 2003 King Arthur's Round Table: How collaborative conversations create smart organizations.

This books will help you think about the way you build community with your colleagues. It is well written and very readable. If you are anticipating negative forces to work with, I highly recommend this book. It has lots of really good advice about how to work with difficult people.

Dixon, Nancy M. (2000) Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know. Harvard Business School

Students have found this book very helpful for thinking about shared knowledge.

Isaacs, W. (1999) Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. New York:Doubleday.

You will need to develop an understanding of dialogue and why people use this term instead of discussion. Change comes mostly through the way you talk and it makes sense to begin thinking about that as soon as possible. You will find that reading them will help you plan your project. For some of you, the "data" of your action research project will be drawn from conversations.

All of you might want to take a look at the Community Intelligence. These are consultants who play that same role that some of you will be taking. They have papers and other resources describing how they do their work. This might be a community of practice that you will want to explore as you begin you work.

Wenger, E., White, N. Smith, J. (2009) Digital Habitats; stewarding technology for communities.

The community of practice for those studying communities of practice is called CPsquareand you might want to join this community if you are planning on creating a community of practice in your action research.

Larson, M. (1997). Making Conversation Discussions as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. Stephan Brookfiedl and Stephen Preskill.

This is a good book for thinking about the way you talk with students.

Linda Darling-Hammond and John Bransford (Editors) (2005) Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do. Jossey-Bass/A Wiley I ISBN: 0-7879-7464-1

This is a source book with lots of good articles. I am not asking your to read the whole book but if you are a teacher educator, you should be familiar with this new book and have read some of the chapters.

Expertise...

I am currently (2011) listening to Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer, which is about memory. I am not recommending it unless you have a side interest in memory. But the next time you are in a bookstore, go and find and look up expertise in the index and read the pages where he talks about what it is involved in developing expertise. The section is about plateaus --and what it takes to move to the next level of expertise. The section is about typing skill and why we stop getting better at things we do over and over again. You will find that the discussion is similar to what you learned from reading surpassing ourselves. Also another popular book that deals with expertise is Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Again, scan this in the bookstore.

Webtools to explore for use in action research try this book...

The super book of Webtools for Educators

Additional Resources on Action Research

Center for Collaborative Action Research

Action Research at Pepperdine University

AERA Special Interest Group in Action Research (you can join this community)

Action Research as Southern Cross University

Network of Action Researchers in Education and Training

Action Research and Action Learning Association

Other links that might be useful as your look for information about your topic

International Education and Resource Network (Iearn.org) (I am happy to sponsor any pepperdine student (for one year) who wants to use this site as a global setting for action research.)

Online Learning Circles (Please join and edit any text that needs fixing--smile)