Action Research Project Update for EDLD 5326

The action research is taking off at the beginning of next year.  By the end of October we (administrative team) have planned on making all the necessary communication forms to let parents and the community knows about the implementation of the plan.  Many of the members of our community have already volunteered their time and effort towards the goals of the plan.  First we en sure our community we have full support of the entire faculty and staff in our school campus.  The parental involvement is a key factor when it comes to changes like these, therefore, we made sure that parents and stakeholders understand the magnitude of the plan, get involved, and pass the voice around.  The results are something that we are expecting to be positive, and all the literature out there looks very confident about this being a solution we could pursuit.
School members along with parents will help to get the rest of the community involved in the process that will provide tangible benefits for our middle school students as they prepare to face the high school years.
Overall, the community would count on a new, technology-based, alternative for the alleviation of the heavy curriculum that our middle school students are currently under.  The results are hypothetical, but with good planning and a lot of effort from all the members of our school community we are walking towards something that can change the way we prepare our middle school students to get the best high school skills.
The progress of the program is something that changes every day for the good of the students, more steps are being taken, and the plan is on the road to success.  It is very satisfying to see how involved our community is, and how much they are willing to help us out.  Everyday new collaborations are formed, and the plan gains members and hands.  At the end of the day, we would be proud to say we started something beneficial for the students, the community, and the world we live in.

Draft Action Research Project (Cont.)

Implementing the vision

Description	Leader	Procedure	Time Frame
Sharing the idea of Online courses/Distance Learning.	David Rivero JoAnn Wallwork Patsy Beverung	Create a campaign to introduce the idea to parents, faculty, staff, and the members of the community by using the school’s newsletter, website, and other forms of communication such as edline, and school reach.	Starting academic year 2013-2013 and ending whenever the plan is fully in action.
Getting the infrastructure ready.	David Rivero JoAnn Wallwork Jason Ogea Members of the New Building campaign	Ensure students with the best possible infrastructure for the implementation of distance learning.	Create a plan to get infrastructure ready for the new building.  Getting server ready for the first test on 2012-2013.
Prepare the action plan for the classes and courses the students will take in order to get ready for high school.	David Rivero 8th Grade Teachers Patsy Beverung	Create and revise lesson plans on critical areas that students will require to master to be able to perform efficiently while at high school.	Directly related to the timing for the infrastructure to be ready.

Steward the Vision
The first mission to be accomplished before getting all the Action Research Plan to work is to get everybody involved.  By everybody, we mean the administrators, the faculty, the staff, the school’s partners in education, the parents are very important, the community that the school is part of, etc.  The idea is to get them to understand why is this important for the students, even if they are not immediately affected by the plan.  For example, the plan is basically to improve performance on students that are going from the 8^th grade to high school.  Some parents may think that doesn’t affect the other grades (like 1-2-3 grade students), but in the long future every student of the school will have to go thru the process and will benefit from the plan.  To prove to parents that the plan is a success is one of the facts that cannot be reversed by any other idea, and it will give proof to the leaders that the plan is something that will benefit all students of school at some point in their academic life.

Promote community involvement in the vision
The methods we will be using to communicate with all members of the community is to use all the current resources we have to communicate for all school activities at this moment.  Methods include our e-mail system setup via our web provider “edline”, using our news section on the website, getting alerts via school reach (automatic phone messages), create a special section on our weekly newsletter, schedule meetings for Q&A sessions, etc.

Manage resources
Part of the resources will be managed by the financial team at school for the better usage of funds.  The total school budget will create numbers that we will study in order to create a separate budget that can provide us with some resources to implement our plan at school in a year where a lot of changes are taking place, including the construction of a new building.
Our teaching resources are going to come from actual members of our faculty and staff who will dedicate their time and effort to the project all for the benefit of our students.  The leadership will come by the hand of our administrators, including the school’s principal and myself.

Mobilize community resources
Basically the support of the community to implement the action research plan is enough for us to create various ways of support.  The school’s community is very supportive of every strategy the school implements, and they are always happy to support our new plans for the benefit of our students.  The PTC (parent-teacher-committee) is a perfect example of the support we get from our community at OLQH School.

Promote positive school culture
When the results from the action research plan come out with a positive conclusion the faculty and the staff at school feels more involved with it than they did before when it was just a hypothetical action research plan. The school’s culture is to support each other with the plans that have the students as the priority for their future input to our community and for the services they will offer other in the future.

Provide an effective instructional program
Opinions about our plan are important to the school and specially to all the leaders of this project.  To know the ideas of all the members of the community is important due to the fact that there is always room for improvement in education, especially when it comes to new plans that are being implemented for the students.  There are always people on the community that can bring new and fresh ideas to the plate; ideas that can represent improvement and that can make the plan, a better plan.

Influencing the larger context
We will create a committee where the members are people that can represent the idea well.  To present results to the community is basically to say if the plan will bring positive results to our students or if we need to work more on it to get it to a point where it is worth putting together.  There are people in our community that can help others understand the plan better, and that can picture the results to those that have questions and concerns about it.

Design a comprehensive professional growth plan
The results/recommendation section is probably one of the most important factors of our initial stages for the first implementation of the Action Research Plan.  Getting the necessary feedback for the community and all the members of the plan is vital to make improvements and to get new ideas to attach to the plan to make it better.  To grow with the process is probably the best strategy to take at initial stages, the results will bring numbers ad data that can be analyzed, studied, and revised by our professional staff so that modifications can be made to the initial “virtual” plan that soon will become a reality that will need improvements and other adaptations to the real world.

Action Research Project Progress Report

Title:
Provide Our Lady Queen of Heaven school with the possibility of implementing distance-course learning for students transitioning from middle school to high school.

Needs Assessment:
Compared to last year’s our school enrollment grew and it is been growing for the last few years; our schedules are getting loaded with new classes and enrichments and the administrative team keeps struggling to find quality time management, good scheduling, and more academic time for students that are getting ready to go to high school.  Currently we have a total of 326 students in middle school grades, 143 Male students, and 183 Female students.
(NOTE: OLQH School considers the 5^th grade as part of its middle school program).

Objectives and Vision of the action research project:
 The leaders of the school found that if we implement online courses and distance-learning alternatives, it would increase the potential of our middle school students considerably enough for them to perform better at the time of ACT test and other required test that measure high school qualifications.
It is important that parents and the community of the school gets involved and show full support of the program in order for it to become a success.  The timeframe needs to be as short as possible, not forgetting about quality, preparation, and the student’s learning capabilities.

Literature and action research strategy:
When the problem is lack of instructional time due to the amount of signatures and enrichments we have to offer as a private school in the state of Louisiana, the solution for the issue lays in the hands of the technology capabilities of the school’s faculty and the students.
“Distance education has two primary potential killer applications, time and spatial independence, over the traditional system of student-instructor time and place congruence. As time independent technologies, distance tools enable students to study and learn at their convenience. As spatially independent technologies, the tools do not require students to be in the same locale as the instructor to receive instruction. Web pages and pre-recorded videotapes are perhaps two of the most common examples of distance education technologies possessing time and spatial independence” (Martinez, 2006).

Martinez, J. G. (2006). Distance education as a competitive tool. Focus V, 2, 49-58. Retrieved from http://focus.bayamon.inter.edu/a5_n2/martinez_a5_n2.pdf

Articulate the Vision:

First we need to make sure we have full support of all the faculty and staff in our school campus.  The parental involvement is a key factor when it comes to changes like these.  The results are something that we are expecting to be positive, and all the literature out there looks very confident that this is a solution we could pursuit.
School members along with parents will help to get the rest of the community involved in the process that will provide tangible benefits for our middle school students as they prepare to face the high school years.

Manage the Organization:

Student safety is the main concern when it comes to implementing new technology that has access to the World Wide Web.  There are many strategies that we (the technology team at OLQHS) are considering to make this a safe-environment plan that only meets the goal of education and that do not put any students under any risks.
The utilization of our school filter can provide a safe environment within the campus, but we need to be aware of the situations we might encounter when the students operate computers from site out of the school perimeter.

Manage Operations:

There will be teams in charge of keeping record of the experiences we encounter as we go.  Once again, the school culture plays a very important role on how we are going to approach this sets of changes within our curriculum.  It is important to note that we are getting an experimental period for the students before we get the program fully established, that way all the member involved in the plan can get a feeling of it without having to risk any priorities for the students to face the high school stage.

Respond to Community Interest and Needs:

We will perform a check on all students participating on the sample group to make sure they possess the requirements to enroll the online courses.  A variation of options will be available for all the students with special needs for they can very much benefit from the technological advantages that our campus provides.
Overall, the community would count on a new, technology-based, alternative for the aliviation of the heavy curriculum that our middle school students are currently under.  The results are hypothetical, but with good planning and a lot of effort from all the members of our school community we are walking towards something that can might change the way we prepare our middle school students to get the best high school skills. 

EDLD 5301 Final Reflections (Nov 2011)

There is a lot of input we got with this class, especially when it comes to managing our time to create effective plans to improve education. We cannot isolate any of the aspects we need to review on this part of the assignment due to the fact that they are all equally important for the development of an action research, and to the completion of this particular class. All guidelines we used along the way were coming from sources that provided information about action researchers that have done previous investigations, gained experience, and now are sharing them with the rest of us for we to use. The readings we did along the five weeks were the base for our planning and the guidelines to put together our own action research, to learn techniques, and to include insights on the specific context surrounding our issues or inquiries. One of the things that got me motivated was the introduction of reflections on inquiries. I don’t think I was completely familiar with the technique and I realize how important it is for administrators to reflect on particular issues.

“A reflection provides a deep understanding of why events occurred as they did, and how those outcomes helped you address your overarching question. At the conclusion of a good reflection, you should ideally know more than you did when you began. If you have not gained new insights about the problem and your problem-solving action, it is likely that you are only summarizing. Reflection is a powerful learning experience and an essential part of action research” (Riel, 2010).

When we start reading about all these experiences, methods, and techniques, that ignites our curiosity and gets us fired up on the topic increasing our enthusiasm for knowing more about the other researchers that have worked with a similar wondering or inquiry before. That is when the technology of our days plays a main role by letting us investigate more about the particular topic, not only within our schools or our particular districts, but also on any place in the world where this topic has been researched before. The internet allows us to gather information from anywhere in the world and the only thing we have to worry about is making sure the sources of the investigations are legitimate and not manipulated results about the research.

“An unshared practitioner inquiry is like the stone lying beside the pond. Unless that inquiry is tossed into the professional conversation that contributes to the knowledge base for teaching and administration, it has little chance of creating change. However, once tossed in, it disturbs the status quo of educational practices, creating a ripple effect that begins with the principal himself and his immediate vicinity (the teachers and students in the building) and emanates out to a district and a state, eventually reaching and contributing to a transformation at the perimeter of practice – in the education profession itself” (Dana, 2009, 135-136).

All assignments and activities we did on this class provided us with a method of direct assessment, and a form of measuring the accuracy of our progression as well as a guideline for improvement of our project with a step-by-step checklist we could follow to achieve success. Every week we did reviews and projects that would prove the accuracy of our topic while letting us reflect on the necessary changes that we would have to make in order to improve our plans and our ways of approaching the inquiry.

Finally there were discussion boards and blogs where we shared with the rest of our colleagues on every topic we are researching and how we were approaching our action research based on the guidelines provided by all the sources I mentioned before. This part, to me, was the most important part of the class, and the part that I enjoyed the most. Learning about all the wonderings that all the other students presented, was one of the most interesting concepts I discovered during this five-week course. Then, they will provide each other with feedback on the different topics, a great way to collaborate to achieve success on each other’s action research. In addition to all those research help methods, the ones I found particularly helpful was the meetings I held with my site mentor during the reviews of the plans. On those meetings I gather valuable information about the specific context I was researching on, and the information I gather was coming from someone that is directly involved and related with the inquiry as well as I am.

Overall, I can say that this class taught me a lot of new ways to accomplish success while managing time and every other issues administrators deal with every singe day while they run the campuses were we work. By being proactive in the practice of all these techniques, we can achieve success, and provide our students with a quality environment for instruction and preparation for their future.

Cited Work

Riel, M. (2010). Understanding Action Research, Center For Collaborative Action Research. Pepperdine University. Accessed online on November 9^th 2011 from http://cadres.pepperdine.edu/ccar/define.html.

Dana, A. F. (2009). Leading with passion and knowledge, the principal as action researcher. (pp. 135-136). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Mentor/Researcher Agreed Upon Action Research Plan

After meeting with my action research mentor this week, we discovered more questions regarding issues that may affect my action research on the short and long term. One of the main issues that always come to discussion is internet safety. Due to the fact that we are a catholic institution, internet safety is one of the most important factors that my mentor is concern about. We decided that to be on the safe side, the next meeting we schedule is going to be with the presence of our school’s server manager. That way we can ask questions, be proactive, and better understand how our can students will be safe in, and out of our campus. All the options will be consider and we will team up to find solutions to all the problems we might encounter.

Another recurrent issue was scheduling the right time for instruction to prepare our students for the program. Last week we talked about selecting a sample group that was going to provide some virtual data that we can start using to make changes and to develop a more accurate plan. After discussing the plan with the sample group, we decided the first time we implement the online class, we will weight it on the grade books to make sure we don’t affect the students GPA with an experimental course.

We truly believe this options will improve the program, and that the program itself will help our middle school students be better prepared when they more to high school.

Sharing the progress and process of the action research

1. Provide Background Information

The best way of explaining the action research I will be conducting on the next few months is to provide some background information about all the parts that would conform the activities that will allow us to collect the data.

After discussing the issues with my mentor and principal, we came to the conclusion that our major issue, and the one we should concentrate our research, was scheduling and finding time for middle school students to obtain more instruction hours during extra curricular time. We are a mid-size Catholic School located in Lake Charles, LA, and our middle school students normally graduate to go to St. Louis Catholic High School or to enroll into public school for their high school years. We currently do not have any online courses, though we offer technology enrichment classes that are web-based, and algebra classes that are web-based as well.

2. Share the Design of the Inquiry (Procedures, Data Collection, and Data Analysis)

He idea is to implement online classes that can open some more curricular time for instruction for our students that are getting ready to move to high school. The procedures will take place during the third week of the rotation schedule where a sample group will be put into an online course after proving their capacities to perform an online-based course. The data obtained by the experiences with this sample group will be utilized to determine the accuracy and the effectiveness of the project.

3. Stating the Learning and Supporting the Statements with Data

The statement for this action research is based on a virtual group that can benefit from online instruction time, computer-based courses, and extra curricular hours of school. The data will provide an accurate vision of the possibilities this technique may open for a school dealing with scheduling issues, and shortage of hours due enrichment classes and new subjects that matter while preparing for high school.

4. Providing Concluding Thoughts

If the program proves to be successful and opens up more spaces for instruction during curricular time, the other departments at school can start implementing online courses for other different subjects and even for the lower graders as well. Not just middle school students will benefit from these programs, but also elementary grade levels can implement single subject or project online classes to improve the student’s performances and instructional time.

Action Planning Template

Tool 7.1 Action Planning Template
GOAL	To alleviate curricular instructional time for our middle school students by implementing online classes and e-school courses during extracurricular hours.
Action Step(s)	Person(s) Responsible	Timeline: Start/End	Needed Resources	Evaluation
1. Perform a check on all students participating on the sample group to make sure they posses the requirements to enroll the online courses.	David Rivero (Technology Enrichment, Webmaster, IT) Patsy Beverung (Technology Coordinator) Jane Piraro (Middle School Coordinator)	Sample group to be picked by the second rotation (third nine weeks of school).	Create a sign up form for students interested on participating on the sample group. Create a dead line for them to analyze the information and make a decision.	After returning sign up sheet, perform a basic technology test for insurance of comprehension of terms and conditions.
2. Select a sample group of students to perform a pilot class to finish details before moving to the real online class.	David Rivero (Technology Enrichment, Webmaster, IT) Jane Piraro (Middle School Coordinator) With the approval of: JoAnn Wallwork (School Principal)	Stating the selection right before the third nine weeks start, and ending right before the class begins.	Forms, basic technology test, computer lab with internet accessibility, students to create a sample group to collect data from.	Check for the student’s knowledge and comprehension of the online course. Make sure students meet the requirements for the online class, and they read the terms and conditions for it.
3. Post schedules for assignments, classes, web meetings, and due dates for students to start organizing a plan for the class.	David Rivero (Technology Enrichment, Webmaster, IT) Jane Piraro (Middle School Coordinator)	Starting the class the very first meeting day. Continuing the student/teacher communication until the end of the nine-week rotation.	Computer lab at school fully equipped and with access to the internet. A blogging account for each one of the students to post assignments and comment on the class blog.	Evaluate and analyze the results of the discussion boards for each week’s assignments.
4. Exploring Programmatic Patterns	David Rivero (Technology Enrichment, Webmaster, IT) Jane Piraro (Middle School Coordinator)	Before the nine weeks start, program leaders need to understand the issues better to be able to organize a more accurate course for students to take.	Assessments with the right questions to gather the right data needed to start the online program.	Asking the appropriate questions, identifying data patterns and gaps, and learning to address equity issues.
5. Taking action for school improvement	JoAnn Wallwork (School Principal) David Rivero (Technology Enrichment, Webmaster, IT) Jane Piraro (Middle School Coordinator)	Throughout the school year, with special emphasis during the weeks while the course is taking place.	The actual resources of this step would be the support from administrators and other members of the school community, including parents and stakeholders.	Using appropriate steps or templates like the SIP or PIP Plan of action to guide the action research