RES 5040: Teacher as Researcher (spring 09)

In teaching research and information skills, what part of the curriculum would you like to support, taking into consideration which teachers would be willing collaborators? Answering that question may help focus your topic quite a bit and it will help you be more effective as well since skills are better taught in the context of students' core learning.

Another thought I had for recruiting teachers to collaborate with is that an offer to help them develop a project that is giving them difficulty might be a good way to go. What do they want help with in the area of information and research? It could be a great idea to get buy in to library services.

Amanda~

Daniel mentioned in the earlier posting, incorporate other teachers as collaborators. This will also “enlarge the circle of inquiry.” It will give you support and other networking opportunities to bring other teachers who are watching along the sidelines.

Have you thought about having the K-2 parents involved as well? You could set up a “Lunch Byte” (pardon the pun) sessions. I vision “Lunch Bytes” as a short program where students’ parents come in and have lunch with them in the media center during a working technology session. Demonstrate some of the basic technology skills that students will be using. Have the students and parents work together on simple exercises. Another thought would be have the students do a “scavenger hunt” on the computer that is acclimated to their grade level.

I wish you the best of luck. I think that this is an awesome idea!

Hey Amanda. In response to your need to narrow the idea down, I have a suggestion. Spend a week interviewing teachers and students in K-2 about the media center. Do some anecdotal research. Come up with few ideas on how to increase the usage of the media center. Then choose one of the ideas, try implementing it, and see if it is effective. This way there is a qualitative aspect, but you can satisfy your itch to crunch numbers because to can count the amount of increased traffic.
Good luck.

I totally agree with the above comments. Get in the classroom and talk it up with the teachers and students. Create a collaborative unit with a teacher that you have a good working relationship with. Get the computer teacher involved. There are wonderful websites for young students on research - The Big 6, for example. I promise others will be willing to give it a shot once they see how it is going. It is never too early to start research.

The above suggestions are excellent, and I particularly agree with Lyme's idea of checking with either the teachers or students about areas of interest/concern before settling on a topic. Stringer's action research plan will require you to establish those relationships at some point during your project, and starting now can ease some of the workload later and, if one of the major purposes of AR is to bring about life-enhancing change, their input will be quite revealing and helpful.

Two things that might help focus your topic or action research plan:

1)Who will you focus more on? The teachers or the students? Or both? Similar to Lyme's question of the homeless situation at Pack, picking a starting group might help get the ball rolling.

2) Is there any special aspect of research or a particular part of the media center (a special collection, database, etc) that you would like to focus on? Or perhaps a special set of research skills that are needed at a certain grade level? If you find an area of interest, it may help you decide on a topic and the best grade level(s) to study.

Amanda,
There are some excellent suggestions by your colleagues above. I think it would be a very manageable project for you to explore the needs of K-2 by interviewing teachers. The outcome of your research (or the "action") could be a curriculum project, or some specific outcome that would benefit you in a new position as well as the students and teachers. This is an excellent topic and the only refining you really need to do at this point is decide on the age group and group of teachers that you would want to talk to. The rest of it will evolve as you progress through the research.

I was interested to read Stringer's description of the difference between action research and what most people, including myself, perceive as research - controlled environments, statistical analysis, etc. I was a bit perplexed at the beginning of this course what I could research in the context of my already crammed packed 5th grade classroom. I went ahead a posted an idea I had, but I feel much better about what I chose after reading Stringer. I particularly liked the diagram on page 4 of the Look-Think-Act Action Research Helix. That makes sense to me! I will have to say that I work in a school that, while it may not know what to call it, practices the action research model regularly. We are constantly collaborating, questioning, and investigating what we are doing, what issues we are facing, and planning how to solve them. It might be a bit more of a crude form of action research than Stringer's ideal, and not at all formal, but it works and is helping us be a better school.

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