Monday, July 12, 2010
Week 2 Reflection
As I listened to the interviews and read the textbook this week, it struck me just how important data is to the success of a school. All three interviews stressed not only the importance of administrators conducting action research, but the importance of teachers conducting it as well. Teachers must also be aware of how to use research data to improve their instruction. For districts to be successful, they must train their teachers how to disaggregate data and apply the results to their instruction. Finding the action research topic that is most meaningful to you is not easy. When I was working on the proposals for part 3 of the assignment, I found myself quickly veering off topic, or developing a proposal that was too vague or large to reasonably study. This is where brainstorming with my mentor really became valuable. Working together, we were able to form my ideas into reasonable and valuable research topics. Each proposal would provide the district with critical data. At that point, it was difficult to pick which I felt was the most important to pursue. I finally settled on the topic I felt was most relevant to my current position.
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Data truly is important, I agree. In our district, however, we felt we had to make a change in how we focused on data. The change is one of semantics, but it helped to redirect our focus. We went from data-driven decision making to data-informed decision making. We found that being data-driven was removing that qualitative piece discussed in the videos - the whole child approach. While being data-informed let us keep the quantitative data while adding the qualitative...so we make informed decisions using all of the data (quantitative and qualitative) available. It seems like a small thing, but makes a world of difference in how data is approached in our district.
ReplyDeleteI also find that brainstorming with my site mentor helps to focus my work in more productive ways. I'm fortunate that my site mentor is my boss, so we've been working together for 5 years and we collaborate well together.
I'm excited to learn more about your action research!