Draft Plan

I've created a draft of my action research plan. I'm sure that plenty of changes will be made, things will be added in, and things will be taken out. But, it's nice to have a starting place.

Action Planning Template
Goal: Determine if students will show improvement in all courses after implementing a new vocabulary plan and focusing on literacy in non-ELA courses.
Action Steps(s):	Person(s) Responsible:	Timeline: Start/End	Needed Resources	Evaluation
Initial Data gathering	Curriculum facilitators for each subject	Prior to 2012-2013 school year	Data from previous year’s STAAR & TAKS	Identify point of origin to provide for final comparison
Presentation of action research plan, guidelines, and how to implement new programs	Bethanee Sales Principal Janis Williams	First faculty meeting of the school year. During professional development prior to students returning. August 2012.	Presentation prepared for faculty	Teacher’s feedback on plan of action. Time to identify concerns, answer questions, and handout materials
Implementing vocabulary, reading, and writing activities	All teachers	First six weeks of school	Access to new literacy program available on database	This will provide the students with the new curriculum incorporations
Collect benchmark data for all courses (other than ELA)	Curriculum facilitator for each subject	December 2012	Access to this benchmark assessment data	Make any conclusions on implementation plan’s success so far. Identify students who qualify for tutorials.
Teacher interviews	All participating teachers	December 2012	Set up interview times	Feedback, questions, concerns
Twice weekly required morning tutorials for “bubble kids”.	Rotating teachers in each subject	February-May 2013	Access to literacy program, individualized student results, and additional materials relating to known weak TEKS.	Students who need extra assistance will be given the opportunity to work in smaller groups with many different teachers.
Collect STAAR data	Curriculum facilitator for each subject	May 2013	Access to STAAR data	Compare to data from last year’s state test assessments and identify margin of improvement.
Student surveys	All students	May 2013	Survey on surveymonkey.com	Feedback from students about the literacy program.
Teacher surveys	All participating teachers	May 2013	Survey on surveymonkey.com	Feedback from teachers about the literacy program.
Present conclusive data	Bethanee Sales Principal Janis Williams	May 2013	Teachers must attend final school board meeting. Conclusive Presentation prepared.	Conclude the research plan and identify success.

Decisions, Decisions

I am in the process of moving to a new school. That being said, I’ve had to find a new site mentor, examine my new campus’ vision, and really discuss what the areas of concern are at my new campus. I have been emailing quite a bit with my new site mentor about my action research and possible topics for this project. Initially, I spoke to her about one of my ideas for research, and she gave me two additional topics to consider. These initial ideas were:

1. Including a “tutorial” time within the school day and how scheduling could be changed to incorporate this.
2. Look at literacy and impact on science scores
3. Effectiveness of reading courses on all academics

When talking further, she said “Literacy and writing are some campus wide goals that we are focusing on so that might be an option for you. We are going to implement a campus wide vocabulary program and increase our focus on writing across all curriculum areas. You could always look at how a focus on literacy impacts performance in non ELA courses.” 

So, the final thing we agreed upon as a topic is: “How does a focus on literacy impact performance in non ELA courses?”.

I think this will be a great adventure, it seems like an interesting topic, and they have already got the ball rolling on incorporating new practices. I am hoping this opens the door to the process of gathering data for my action research plan! Maybe things will fall into place.

Beginnings of Action Research

Wow, action research has been an exciting thing to begin! At first, I was overwhelmed about the entire idea. However, after reading and researching what I'm getting myself into, I've changed more into excited and eager to get to work.

My first questions were what is action research? What is the "action" part? How is different that research that I'm familiar with? Basically, action research takes the ability of reflection on my current practices and the practices within my school and created a change from the outside in. 

Action research follows this plan:

1. inquiry 

2. data collection 

3. analysis of data 

4. implementing change

Action research begins with wonderings, ideas, concerns, and thoughts, blossoms from there into data collection and reflection, and then allows from improvement, expansion, and growth.

There are a ton of ways that I could use action research, as an educator and an administrator. For this course, I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to research, yet. I have a few ideas. My first idea is concerning tutorial time at school and how to make this more effective. My other two ideas are on a much smaller scale. I would like to look at literacy and impact on science scores, or effectiveness of reading courses on all academics.

Journaling and/or blogging are great ways to capture thinking and create a reference for reflection. As time goes on, and inquiry develops into something more, I will be able to track the thought process and see the change over time through looking back at these blogs. Also, this is a great way to share my inquiries and work with other administrators and colleagues and receive their feedback.