Action Research: A Self-Directed Approach to Professional Development
In the Classroom with Bijal Damani
The best part about being a teacher is that you get to remain a student forever. Teachers are lifelong learners.
To be an effective educator, you must constantly pursue learning through workshops, conferences, on-site or online training modules, and seminars. Professional development can help teachers stay up-to-date with new trends and learn new techniques, strategies, and methods for dealing with various classroom challenges. But all professional development is not the same.
It's important to measure how much a teacher's classroom practices change after receiving professional development because training sometimes fails to meet the specific needs of a teacher. That is the reason that teachers may feel they haven't received the answer to the specific challenges they needed help facing, even after attending numerous seminars or workshops. This perceived deficiency can lead teachers to embrace professional development only when some reward is attached to it.
If you feel frustrated by not being able to find what you need, how about creating your own solutions? Every classroom challenge is as individual as the students in the class. Sometimes, instead of looking for solutions out there somewhere, it helps if a teacher learns to understand the challenge and experiments to find the answer that suits her class or students. Most teachers shy away from the word "research," thinking it is scholars' job to conduct research and come up with condensed data or analysis. But all of us are researchers, consciously or otherwise.
As teachers, we are always thinking about what we can do to reach out and engage students in our classes. And haven't we been experimenting by changing the way we give homework, grouping students differently, changing the classroom layout, or introducing some game or technology to see its effect on student learning? We have been doing these things for years—informally, maybe, but this is still a type of research.
Teachers can do action research by formally defining a problem, drafting a hypothesis, collecting and organizing data, and coming to a conclusion about the effect of the hypothesized change. And the conclusion you derive will be more meaningful and effective because it deals with your challenges and your solutions, keeping in mind your circumstances and resources.
Sharing of individual research among the teachers in a school is one of the most effective and inexpensive tools for teacher development. Action research can result in effective teaching, better learning outcomes, and more confident teachers. Try it in your school!