Week 3 - What I've learned

One of the best ways to get your information out is to present your information orally.  Usually throughout the year many hours are devoted to professional learning days.  This time can be used to get your information out.  Teachers from around the district can sign up to hear the information that you have gathered on the research topic you have worked on.  Also, major education conferences are always looking for speakers to present their information and findings.  My school just participated in the Educational SXSW conference last week in regards to using ProjectShare from Region 4 in the classroom with students.

Also, writing your research findings and getting them published is a great way to get your information out.  Most administrators and continuing education students subscribe to journals and sites where information is published.  This is a great way to get your research and studies out to an even bigger number of people.

Lastly, providing the information from your action research plan can be used to make a change on your campus.  Sharing the information that you have found can be provided to colleagues on your campus so they can enact the same process.  They can further add to the research if they follow the same process that you started.  This is what I plan on doing with my Action Research Project.  The information that I gather will be used to enact a new discipline/consequence plan school wide.  I’m hoping that my colleagues will buy in to the new approach, and in turn provide the data necessary for my project.  At the end of the study I will provide the overall data collect from the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 school years.  In the end a decision will be made based off of this data.

Information will be provided along the way.  The first piece of information that will be provided to the staff and students is background information.  Working Lunch was an idea that originally worked, but has failed to meet the needs of all our learners

The second piece of information that will be provided to the staff is sharing how the design process will proceed.  I will share with them all forms of data that will be collected including, the # of students per day that attend Working Lunch, the names of students that are habitual attendees, the grades of habitual attendees in 1st period and 4th period (right before lunch), and discipline referrals for the habitual attendees.

The third piece of information that will be provided to the staff is sharing the learning from the research.  After the 2-year study is completed all the data will be presented to the staff.  An argument will be built to support my findings by providing evidence in the form of data. 

The fourth and final piece of information that will be provided to the staff is that of concluding thoughts.  This will be the answer to the original question that was used for the research, “Is the Raines High School Working Lunch discipline consequence meeting the needs of our learners?”  More questions may be generated after the concluding thoughts, but this process tends to be cyclical.  Future studies can be launched from these new questions generated.