The moment I watched the very first video, I realized that action research is something I have done my entire career in teaching... I just didn't know it. According to Mertler (2019), "action research allows teachers to study their own classrooms-for example, their own instructional methods, their own students, and their own assessments-in order to better understand them and be able to improve their quality or effectiveness" (p. 4). I have always been that teacher. I have had all of my teaching experience in a self-contained classroom, so I have not had the opportunity to fix or change my instruction of the next group of students. There have been MANY times, however, that I have stopped an entire lesson that I noticed was not working. I have told my students that I was not teaching the lesson in a way for them to understand it so we are going to stop what we are doing and I would try again the following day. I would often go to another teacher from my grade level and asked what they were doing to help the students "get it" or I would look up different ways to teach the concept. I followed the steps of action research without knowing it. Now that I know what action research truly is, I can purposefully do it for my lessons.
After looking at and studying the 4 stages and 9 steps, I honestly believe that the developing and reflecting stage are the most important. After assessing, you MUST take the data you collected and observed and use that data to re-teach and re-assess in order for the students to be more successful. At my current school, we have PLC weekly meetings. The coaches claim that the meetings are for data collection and discussion then planning according to the data. This would be EXCELLENT if that was how things actually went! At my first school, we did a much better job of this! We came together as a team, discussed data AS A TEAM, and worked together to find ways to help our students. ALL of the 2nd grade students belonged to every 2nd grade teacher. We all knew which students needed help and which ones were above level. Our data meetings were every week and we had a huge spreadsheet that we all worked on together. The action research that we conducted at that school worked! Our students not only survived, they thrived!
I'm actually excited to learn more about this process so I can bring it back to my team and my coaches next school year!
Mertler, C. A. (2019). Action research: Improving schools and empowering educators (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
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