Action Research Plan for 5301

Action Research Plan

· Goals and objectives/outcomes of the research investigation

The goals and objectives of the research investigation will be to find out the impact that the involvement in extracurricular activities has on students (particularly high school students). From what I have seen it seems that students who involve themselves in extracurricular activities make it a point to come to school more often than those students who are not involved. Based on the outcome of the research I will work with the school to renew a campaign to get students involved in at lease two extracurricular activities and then gauge the attendance rate to see if there is any noticeable improvement.

· Activities designed to achieve the objectives

The project is really two-fold. The first part will be to gather information to find out the impact that the involvement in extracurricular activities has on students. The second part will be to renew a campaign to get students involved in at lease two extracurricular activities and then gauge the attendance rate to see if there is any noticeable improvement. The only way to ensure that the campaign to get students involved is working will be to work with the sponsors of clubs and organizations to see if their numbers climb from previous years.

· Resources and research tools needed for data gathering

I will be working closely with the attendance office to closely monitor the weekly attendance rates of students and then compare that number with the same week from previous years. This information will be critical in order to be able to prove that the extracurricular activity involvement is having an effect. I will also work with students in my class to find out who has never before been involved in an extracurricular activity and has joined one now and then look at their individual attendance rates compared with previous years to determine if their involvement is having an impact. I will need to work closely with a number of the larger and well known clubs/organizations to see what effect the campaign to get students involved is having on their numbers. The administration will need to help the campaign along through morning announcements and reminders during staff developments and meetings. I will also be handing out a survey to the students that I have in my classes throughout the day in order to get an idea of what sort of extracurricular activities students are interested in that may not currently be available. I will also include a question that will let me know if the student is currently involved in any activities. This should help me determine what the school needs to implement in order to get the students who are not currently involved in a club or organization to do so.

· Draft timeline for completion or implementation of activities

This campaign was actually began last year in an effort to boost attendance and school spirit. However, I feel that because the plan was not really implemented until mid-November the impact was minimal. Now that we know what to do and how to do it a little bit better we should be able to begin the year with announcements and reminders to get the students involved. I can begin my research for the project right now to get an idea of what the relevant literature says about the subject. Within the first week of school the campaign to get students involved can begin with morning announcements and teacher encouragement coupled with signs posted around the school. Students need to be made aware of what clubs/organizations are available and what goes on in each of them.

· Persons responsible for implementation of the action research plan

I will be responsible for the implementation of the research plan but I will be relying on a number of people at the school to provide information and resources to get students involved.

· Process for monitoring the achievement of goals and objectives

I will be working closely with the attendance office to closely monitor the weekly attendance rates of students and then compare that number with the same week from previous years. This information will be critical in order to be able to prove that the extracurricular activity involvement is having an effect. . I will need to work closely with a number of the larger and well known clubs/organizations to see what effect the campaign to get students involved is having on their numbers.

· Assessment instrument(s) to evaluate the effectiveness of the action research study

The overall instrument that I will use to evaluate the effectiveness of the study will be the number of students who involve themselves in extracurricular activities (using the numbers provided to be from the club/organization sponsors) as well as the attendance rate.

5301: Week 3

• Goals and objectives/outcomes of the research investigation

The goals and objectives of the research investigation will be to find out the impact that the involvement in extracurricular activities has on students (particularly high school students). From what I have seen it seems that students who involve themselves in extracurricular activities make it a point to come to school more often than those students who are not involved. Based on the outcome of the research I will work with the school to renew a campaign to get students involved in at lease two extracurricular activities and then gauge the attendance rate to see if there is any noticeable improvement.

• Activities designed to achieve the objectives

The project is really two-fold. The first part will be to gather information to find out the impact that the involvement in extracurricular activities has on students. The second part will be to renew a campaign to get students involved in at lease two extracurricular activities and then gauge the attendance rate to see if there is any noticeable improvement. The only way to ensure that the campaign to get students involved is working will be to work with the sponsors of clubs and organizations to see if their numbers climb from previous years.

• Resources and research tools needed for data gathering

I will be working closely with the attendance office to closely monitor the weekly attendance rates of students and then compare that number with the same week from previous years. This information will be critical in order to be able to prove that the extracurricular activity involvement is having an effect. I will also work with students in my class to find out who has never before been involved in an extracurricular activity and has joined one now and then look at their individual attendance rates compared with previous years to determine if their involvement is having an impact. I will need to work closely with a number of the larger and well known clubs/organizations to see what effect the campaign to get students involved is having on their numbers. The administration will need to help the campaign along through morning announcements and reminders during staff developments and meetings.

• Draft timeline for completion or implementation of activities

This campaign was actually began last year in an effort to boost attendance and school spirit. However, I feel that because the plan was not really implemented until mid-November the impact was minimal. Now that we know what to do and how to do it a little bit better we should be able to begin the year with announcements and reminders to get the students involved. I can begin my research for the project right now to get an idea of what the relevant literature says about the subject. Within the first week of school the campaign to get students involved can begin with morning announcements and teacher encouragement coupled with signs posted around the school. Students need to be made aware of what clubs/organizations are available and what goes on in each of them.

• Persons responsible for implementation of the action research plan

I will be responsible for the implementation of the research plan but I will be relying on a number of people at the school to provide information and resources to get students involved.

• Process for monitoring the achievement of goals and objectives

I will be working closely with the attendance office to closely monitor the weekly attendance rates of students and then compare that number with the same week from previous years. This information will be critical in order to be able to prove that the extracurricular activity involvement is having an effect. . I will need to work closely with a number of the larger and well known clubs/organizations to see what effect the campaign to get students involved is having on their numbers.

• Assessment instrument(s) to evaluate the effectiveness of the action research study

The overall instrument that I will use to evaluate the effectiveness of the study will be the number of students who involve themselves in extracurricular activities (using the numbers provided to be from the club/organization sponsors) as well as the attendance rate.

5301: Week 2 Reflection

I suppose that the main thing that I took away from week two was all of the ways that action research could be used in regards to common issues faced by most school districts. The reading on pages 29-68 in the Dana text regarding the 9 passions was particularly insightful on this subject. The assignment also required me to really examine some of the issues going on at my campus in order to determine what the best topic would be for me to use for the main assignment for the class. Looking back over my internship plan made me realize how quickly situations change over the course of a year at a school campus. Overall it was a really interesting week.

5301: Educators using blogs

Students today love the chance to use technology to do school work. Educators could easily use blogs as a way to get students to write about an issue and to feed off of each others thoughts. For example, a teacher could post a question about a subject before or during a unit on that subject as a way to get the students thinking about it. Each students could be required to answer the question and then post a response to another student’s answer. Students love to see their writing/work online.

5301: Action Research: What I have learned

After completing the readings for the week one assignment I feel that action research has two awesome benefits that can be put to use by administrators and schools.

The first benefit is the way in which action research is geared towards helping a person find a solution to a problem or simply a better way of doing something. Using relevant literature and shared finding with others and then putting that new information to use in order to come up with a solution or finding that is directly related to the problem or issue at hand is a great way to ensure that administrators are putting into place the most relevant and effective policies or programs.

The second benefit that can be derived from the action research process is the cohesion that is created when people are brought together to come up with a solution to a problem using action research. The Dana text likened this process to that which might take place on a college campus where students are put into groups in order to work together to come up with a common solution to a problem or project. The cohesion that is formed amongst the members of the group is something that can really benefit staff members at a school.

I feel that I would be hard-pressed to find a common problem facing most schools that could not be solved by using action research. This highly applicable process could be used by most problem solving groups on a school campus. As an individual administrator I could put this process to use to both solve problems and as a way to look at myself and the job that I am doing critically.

Week 5 Reflection Paper

Many of the courses that I took in my undergraduate studies to become a teacher revolved around the use of technology in the classroom. I loved hearing about all of the ways that teachers were incorporating technology into their instruction and looked forward to having a classroom of my own where I could implement many of the ideas that I had learned. However, I was quite surprised to find how many of the tools that I had learned about in those classes were not available at my school.
Going into this course I really expected it to be more about the development of technology policy than about technology itself. However, I was happy to find out, after week one and throughout the remaining weeks, that the course was really about the technologies that should be used in classrooms that many schools seem to be afraid of. This was a really refreshing viewpoint to come from an educational institution.
One of the main goals that I had for the course was to learn at least five new technologies that I could personally put to use on my campus. I can say that after reading the articles, blogs, presentations, round-table discussions, video conferences, and discussion board posts, I can come up with a lot more than five new technologies. Blogging, teacher-created web-sites, podcasts, wikis, and video uploads and all ideas that I have brought to different teachers in my building who have the hardware at their disposal but who weren’t sure how to put it to use. If I had to pick one goal that I was not able to reach it would be to change the district policy on blogging and podcasting. Although some teachers still use these tools, they are against school policy. I can say, however, that I brought this issue up with the Superintendent of our school (Dr. Wanda Bamberg) and she has asked me to put together a list of websites that would need un-blocked and some research that shows that these are indeed educational tools. Thanks to many of the readings done in week 3 and 4 I am fully confident in my ability to get the policy changed sometime next semester.
I felt that I was successful in carrying out the assignments for the class. While they were time-consuming I felt that they all dealt with very relevant issues and were therefore interesting. I really enjoyed the assignment for week three (and four) which required me to talk with various people on my campus and in my district about technology. I really doubt that I would have had the meaningful and insightful conversations that I had if it were not for the class.
One of the better interviews that I conducted for the work done in weeks three and four was held with the technology specialists at my campus as well as the technology director for the district who happened to be on campus that day. We ended up talking a lot about blogging and the benefits that blogging could have on students performance in classes ranging from English to science. As it stands right now, (and this conversation happened before the one that took place with Dr. Bamberg) all sites that are used for blogging or contain blogs are blocked by the district. The policy is in place due to the fear that school districts have of being held accountable for what students may read or see on a website accessed from school. However, that argument is, to me, the same as saying the students should not be permitted to breathe the air at school as there could be contaminants in the air. There is simply no way to control everything that students see when they are on the internet. What the students are missing out on educationally far outweighs the results of our efforts to “save” them from seeing something negative online.
One of the readings from week one pointed out that students tend to write more and better when they do so on a computer versus on paper. I conducted an interview with the teacher who runs our virtual school computer lab and she said the same thing. She told me that she has been amazed at the increase in both the student interest level as well as the productivity when writing on the computer has been an option. This fact, coupled with the interest students show in seeing their own words appear on the internet to be read by everyone, is reason enough to unblock sites that allow teachers to set up free blogs for their classes. It is always an uphill battle to get students interested in what we are teaching in our classrooms. If we find a tool that could help peak that interest level then why are we not utilizing it?
If a student wants to find something bad on the internet they are going to find a way to do just that. I would say that blogging sites should be one of the least of our concerns when it comes to monitoring the internet. Aside from it’s use in the classroom, blogging could also offer stakeholders in the community such as parents and business owners a quick and easy opportunity to voice their opinions about matters concerning them and the school. Parent and community involvement is always a goal at our campus and offering them a quick and easy way to communicate their feelings could really strengthen the ties that the school has with them.

Week 4 Flow Chart

Flow Chart for Week 4 Assignment:

Professional Development Planning

Based on the data and lessons learned from the about the campus technology needs from the week 3 research paper I can say, without question, that the greatest staff development need that the campus has is making sure that we are providing staff development for teachers when they receive a new technology in their room. Far too often a new technology is installed in a classroom and it is then left to the teacher to figure out how to use it.

Even if a teacher does figure out how to use a newly-installed technology, chances are they are not using it to its fullest potential. Schools are always trying to do what they can to make sure that each dollar is stretched as far as it can and this is an easy and cost-efficient way to ensure that the money that is spent on technologies goes as far as possible towards the goal of enhancing technologies. The technology specialists needs to work in close coordination with the principal to plan out staff developments based on the calendar of purchases of new technologies dictated by the needs of the various departments in the school.