I’m finishing up class 8 of 12 getting that much closer to completing something I thought I wouldn’t even do…. There is so much to talk about and so much I’ve learned going through this program.
My concern going into 5315 was having to complete another literature review, but since I planned accordingly I was able to get it done without wasting too much time. I also got to enjoy going to Dallas to experience the AVID summer institute which was great because I got to learn, spend time with the family and work with some new teammates for the upcoming school year.
I asked my wife yesterday what was the chance I could get a new job with this Masters degree and her honest opinion was even better than I could have imagined. She said “You’re learning and growing so much in your role and they really value you at your school.” She went on to say more along the lines of they are trusting me and putting me in good positions to learn, grow, and develop so I’m super excited because this time last year I didn’t think I would be here.
5315 focused on Action Research and I’m sure like myself we were all wondering what’s action research? Definitely through us all for a loop. Once we got into it, it wasn’t that complicated, we already do action research, now it’s just a matter of having a structure to initiate our plan, track it with data, share our findings and repeat the process as necessary.
We created an Action Research Outline where we laid out the skeleton of our plan and narrow our ideas. I continued to focus on ePortfolio implementation and have decided to plan my action research on that. My research question is finding out the perceptions of the student and how they feel about the ePortfolio and how they adapt to it. I also want to see if ePortfolios help students improve overall learning through their work, scores, etc.
The next part was to focus on more of the literature and create another Literature Review focusing on Action Research literature. While the study is limited on research for middle and high school initiatives, I was able to find some information and found enough to support my understanding. Now with the action research plan, I can hopefully contribute to the literature in the future and provide knowledge and information for others.
Lastly, we had to tie it all together and create our actual Action Research Plan. We were to dive into a deeper amount of detail with the plan, research, implementation, how we would handle changes, how to present our findings. It is extremely thorough and we had to create our documents to collect data such as likert surveys, data tracking sheets and any other document we need.
I was once super worried about this course and now that it’s over, I wish I could go back and expand this class a bit more to learn and see other information about Action Research. I definitely looking forward to the rest of the program and seeing what the Capstone Project consists of, while putting all of this together in a final product.
Let Them Learn 