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.