Action Research as Effective Professional Development

Professional development is extremely important for our administrators and teachers in order to combat the challenges that we, as educators, face on a daily basis.  Our world is changing at a high rate, and I believe it is our responsibility to try and keep up for our students’ sake.  Our number one priority in a learning community should be to promote student learning and success.  That being said, many of us are letting our students down in a major way.  Not that we don’t WANT to do what is best for our students, but we often don’t have the tools necessary to help them learn and be successful. 

However, professional development in general is not effective enough to help administrators and teachers help their students.  Action research as professional development is.  Action research is geared toward to helping a specific set of administrators and/or teachers in a specific problem area that deals with specific students in a specific learning community.  The key word here is ‘specific.’  Too often we try to grow professionally by going to workshops, seminars, conferences, and/or taking courses to improve our teaching and to find new ways to help our students.  This is great, but it is not enough.  In order to truly help our students, we need to engage in action research by identifying a problem area for our students, attending professional development or reviewing literature relevant to the problem, finding possible solutions that are unique to our students, implementing them in our classrooms and schools, and if the proposed solution doesn’t work, then try, try again!  When we find something that does work, we need to share with our colleagues so that more and more students will benefit from administrators’and teachers’ action research.  Most importantly, this should be an on-going, never-ending process of professional growth in order to keep up with our ever-changing world and students. 

Personally as a high school English teacher, my first step in using action research is going to be identifying a specific set of students who failed the 9^th Grade Reading and Writing EOC, grouping them together in one class, and putting them in small groups with students that have difficulty in the same areas. At this point I would like to focus their curriculum on those specific problem areas in order to improve their scores.  More detail and research for this action research plan will be required in order to effectively implement it, and I will be working closely with my site supervisor, the dean of instruction, to come up with the specifics.  Stay tuned to read about the actual research action plan and the results!