Activities

Beginning your Action Research 652

"We must become the change we wish to see in the world." -- Mahatma Gandhi

You have read about action research and you have been planning your action research. You will have already have explored what others have done before you and you should be a part of a community of practice that is related to your work or the change you are going to implement and study.

1) Short Description of Your Action Research Project

Write a short descriptive summary of your action research to describe your work to your new learning circle partners in your Circle Forum. This should focus on the nature of the problem you are working on and what actions you plan to take. You should try writing this fresh as a message in the forums. Think-- how can get these new people interested in what I see is a problem. You might want to think back to values.

It should take you about about a half hour to write and can be completed in a few paragraphs. Do this as soon as possible and post in your learning circle forum. Then save this text and move it to your action research web site. This will be one of the several drafts you will use to craft your introduction in your final report.

DUE Week 1- Jan 7: This should be ready to post in the forums at the beginning of the term.

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2) Action Research Timeline

Revise or revisit your timeline (part of your action research plan). Map out the activities and put dates to them working your way through to the Action Research Conference in June. This should also be posted in your learning circles and you might want to keep a print page next to your computer. This is your work plan.

Due date Jan. 14

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3) Transforming your Action Research Plan into your Report Outline

Your revised Action research plan should be on your website. Now you are going to write your outline for your final report--but don't let that freak you out. We will take it one step at a time. As you see, you have worked on lots of it already.)You can make it an interactive outline with links to each section or one long page with headings. We will be filling it out. This replaces your current plan.

4) Thinking with People--An Exercise in Data Analysis (Due in Orlando)

The assignment will involve analysis of data that has been collected with the help of students from previous cadres and other action researchers. It will be a group project with your learning circle. Imagine that your research effort involves as an outcome the way is which people make sense of action research. You can create the situation that led you to create this data, but essesntially your task is to decide what a number of action researchers mean by "action research." These entries have been collected in qualtrics. The definitions are accompanied by information on the age, gender and cadre of the person posting the definition.

Your task as a circle will to be to analyze this data collection. You are free to use the tools in qualtrics. To do this you will to log on as mriel with password omet. However this is more a qualititative analysis exercise. If that is a new term for you, look and read about it on the internet. We haev listed some books that you might want to explore but you can do your reading about research methods online.

NOW (listen carefully) most of you have not done qualitative research before. So don't panic--Think Legos at virtcamp -- this is a group project. Second--in case you are still breathing hard-- the grade will be an A if you group attemts a solution.

The data is in a Qualtric survey:

Log on to Qualitrics.

USER name is my mriel

I will put the password in the wiki on SAKAI for the course. (If you want to guess --try a four letter word starting with M(caps) followed by a 5-letter word (lower case) starting with c.

You will see reports that were run by students in the past cadre. I leave them up for ideas. Since you all use the account, everything has my name. Feel free to try your own surverys. I see this as a class account.

You will need to find the major themes or ideas that some group of respondents used to describe action research. There are many different ways of doing this and your group should decide on a method of analysis. You might want to generate some different themes and then count how often these themes are mentioned. You may want to code each phase and then combine similar codes and find a way to organize your results into themes. The responses might fall into different categories based on some dimensions that you discover when you read them as a set. You might want to consider who made the statements. Depending on what you want to know, you might not need to use all of them. These are all ways of using data to understand a group response.

You will be making a claim. Then you will support your claim with evidence that you can point to and then draw an inference from your analysis-- this is your warranted claim.

Read the data analysis chapters in your books and try one one or more ideas. Or read online. The purpose is for you to experiment with research methods, and run into problems that researchers face as a community. Then we will use these problems as a way of taking about the shared conventions that researchers have evolved for handling this problems. The goal of the activity is three-fold,

1. to help you build a deeper understanding of action research
2. to surface issues and methods in doing research--validity and reliability
3. to help you craft a section in your report that describes the approach (action research ) that you are using.

You will need to do your analysis BEFORE the midpoint meeting. Use your action research books for ideas on how to analyze data. We will discuss your results in Florida. Each of your groups will be making a 10-minute presentation. The end result will be a paragraph or two defining action research.

Presentation Due in Orlando ~Feb 1

5) Evaluation Tutorials

I will be asking you to read through at least one Professional Development Modules

The website identifies the professional development modules as designed for users who:

* want an introduction to all the major components of an evaluation

* are novice evaluators and want to learn more/self-instruct

* are experienced evaluators and want expertise/advice in a targeted area

You are not evaluators, you are action researchers. So these tutorials are not perfectly designed for you. However they can be very useful. Each module contains (1) step-by-step strategies and tools of evaluators (2) a scenarios which helps you see how to apply the tools to an evaluation problem and 3) a case study in which there are questions to be answered (and then compared to peers and experts). You do NOT have to leave your names nor do you have to respond to the questions. And if you don't understand some of the methodological concepts, don't panic. You will each take different things from the tutorials.

Here are the list--I think that the second one is likely to be of must use to you.

http://oerl.sri.com/module/index.html

* Designing an Evaluation:

.... Methodological Approach and Sampling

* Developing Written Questionnaires:

.... Determining if Questionnaires Should be Used

.... Writing Questionnaires

.... Questionnaire Design

.... Administering Questionnaires

* Developing Interviews:

.... Preparing an Interview Protocol

.... Administering Interviews

* Data Collection:

.... Procedures, Schedule, and Monitoring

* Instrument Triangulation and Adaptation

We will be discussing these in the forums after the face to face. So if you have time to do them doing the break, that would put you ahead. Then you can look through them again at the beginning of February.

Should be completed by Feb. 9 (Earlier if you are creating surveys)

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6) Revision of your Lit review and APA check

All of you will be working on your literature reviews with Regina Miester. She is expecting to work with you during the month of Jan and Feb.. I will set you set your time. This way, she will not have to work with all of you at the same time. A few of you are ready to get comments from her in January and I would encourage this. Most of you will be busy with the other assignments and will be able to set a time in February. I expect you set a time with her and be responsible for working with her. This is a wonderful service that your tuition pays for and I am eager to have you all take advantage of it. If you have already been working with her, that you are ahead of the game.

Regina Meister

Manager, Writing Support

GSEP

Pepperdine University

West Los Angeles

310-258-2815

www.gsep.pepperdine.edu/studentservices/writing/

All reviews should be completed by FEB 28.

7) Your Research Cycles

What counts as a cycle will be different for each of you. They are not likely to be of equal duration or intensity. Your first action might only last a few days or a week and the second could be 3 months. Or the inverse is also possible. There is no need for each of your actions to be of equal duration. It is also possible for cycles to run concurrently as long as you have plans for how to write up the reports in way that does not place all of the writing at the end of the session. The point is to experiment with your actions, learn from your research and apply what you have learned to achieve a progressively better outcome. Sometimes you will find that you need to take a step backwards or sideways to learn how to move forward. There is no perfect number. We suggest 3 as a way to help you learn the process and go though the steps with us. Some students do as many as 6 and others do less. You might find you rethink what a cycle is as you move along.

• Your First Cycle of Action Research report

Tell us the story of what you did and what happened. In order to tell this story you will need to have some way of documenting what happened. Reflect on the story in light of what you have been learning in your other courses. What will you do or change for your next cycle of action-reaction-reflection and plan?

Plan to write this cycle in early January

• The Second Cycle of Action Research report

Again it will depend on the way you work within your community. In some cases, it will be difficult to distinguish the cycles but your learning circle will help you do this. If you have two cycles completed and described and you are planning or doing your third cycle by the end of this term you will be in good shape for finishing without loss of sleep in the Spring.

Plan to write cycle 2 in late February

• The Third Cycle of Action Research planned or started

These due dates will be determined by the flow your action research. Some of you will have more than three iterations of you work. We try to have at least three so that you can see how these different passes help you shape your understanding of your work place. This is a fast paced program so don't get left behind.

Plan to write cycle three report in early April

(Plan to finish writing all of your cycle reports by the end of May)

8) Reading Activity and 652 Forums - whole class

Knowledge building in forums

Please be active in one or both of the forums around the two options for our shared reading. One is a book of chapters with different people reading different chapters. The other is more about how to adjust your way of talking to create new patterns of change. I look forward to your comments on both these books. I am still reading both of them.

Research books.

We will be reading different books on research method. These will be for your activity and discussion if you have questions. The goal of these books is to help you think through and develop tools for doing your action research.

You should continue to read materials that will help you with your topics and use them to revise your literature review. Help each other by looking for things that might interest them. You will want to post your notes as you work through the materails as others might benefit from them.

All Semester on a weekly basis

9) Your Action Research Journal (Blog)

The more regularly you write in your journal, the more written work you will have to pull from when you are ready to write your final report. You should be in the practice of making weekly entries. And I should see improvement in your entries. Here is a rough progression:

1) Reflective Description-- you tell us what took place and some thoughts about the how and why of the events. This chronicles your action research process and is very important

2) Reflective Practice -- This is the form of reflection where you draw out the connections between what is happening now with what has happened in the past and what you think might happen in the future. You have moved away from the description of the research setting to your larger framework of the nature of the practice that you are engaged in and how your action and reactions have helped you rethink the way you practice.

3) Reflective Knowledge Building--This moves to the abstract level... how does this event link to what you know and are learning. This is knowledge building. In the end, your knowledge should be different as you open up your philosophical stance and compare it to the data you have collected. There is a back and forth between the empirical data and the mental structure of you mind. It is a flexible state where you use data to explore the way you think.

Weekly entries all Semester and it would be good to mark the type of reflection you are writing.

10) Forum Discussions - Learning Circles

Your learning circles discussions are very important. Talk is the central vehicle for sharing, analyzing and evaluating actions that define your practice. It is how we learn. In your learning circle forum messages I want to concentrate on the following:

1) Revisit the description of your practice and logic model--your new circle partners need to understand what is taking place and why you think a given action is going to produce results. We need to know why you are taking the actions you have selected.

2) Attention to evidence--This will be the heart of this semester. We want to bring the evidence to the forum and look carefully. I want each of you to work at developing alternative interpretations and other possibilities. We are often blinded by what we think. We depend on each others to see without the blinders. That is one of the fundamental reasons for learning circles, to share alternate way of thinking. So do NOT be afraid to challenge data. We do it to help you see past what you think.

In a discussion, what builds knowledge... Here are some ideas of how you can participate in discussions in way that build knowledge together:

Affirmations --

• Help others see their strengths
• Compliments are more effective with you can be specific about what make something good.

Extensions--

• Look for underlying causes or draw connections between behavior on one setting and another.
• Share a relevant story from your practice and making the conceptual link back to the their situation.
• Summarize a discussion pulling what others have said and synthesizing into a few clear positions and then extending the discussion.
• Find more evidence to support their ideas or practice.
• Represent the information in the way that helps see the connections

Constructive Criticism --

• Suggest design improvement in the action research or different methods that they might try.
• Challenge a position or assumption with the goal of helping the person be more reflective on different perspectives.
• Find and share information that challenge there ideas or practice.
• Represent the information in a way that helps one see different connections.

Ask yourself what you are doing before, during and after writing a comment. Be aware of your development of your skill to build knowledge collaboratively through dialogue.