I decided that my current discussion forum post is timely and does a good job of explaining where I find myself in my current action research. I've had some trouble finding literature, but I'm feeling like I'll find more as I continue to dig.
I'm in the middle of it, literally, as I live the instructional changes that I my inquiry has led me to study. Here is my post and some insight into where I find myself in my reseach: not quite as far as I hoped...
The
reason behind why I chose to work on the project that I did was, what I thought
at the time, a practical one. We were faced with deciding whether to configure
our instructional time as self-contained or departmentalized general education.
Last year was my second year out of special education and the first year that
we taught in a self contained arrangement. The biggest problem I had with this
setup was that I only felt fully prepared to teach and deliver intervention in
the subject(s) that I planned. We rotated subject planning that year as most of
the team was new and we wanted a feel for each area. This was partially in
anticipation of the departmentalized structure for this year. It seemed
overwhelming to me to switch gears mentally from subject to subject and
gathering materials for each was proving impossible, especially for science as
we had limited class sets. When we set down as a team to discuss the upcoming
year with our principal I asked if anyone had hard evidence related to student
performance in these different arrangements. None of us did. At the time I was
in the Lamar Academic Partnership program and was looking for the topic of my
action research and decided this could be viable.
After
initially searching for literature I found very little. To this point, I have
only been able to locate one dedicated article from the last decade and one
that only partially addressed the topic from the mid seventies, but I will
continue the search until I have completed my work. As far as the accompanying
research I feel like I am in the middle of it. After this year I will have raw
data related to STAAR performance, curriculum based assessments and student
grades, much that I can dis-aggregate and search through for patterns. I will
also take into consideration teacher perception of the schedule, which as you
can imagine, I am already getting plenty of. I’ll use surveys and interviews to
gather actual information to use in the project when the time comes.
I hope
what I learn and share offers some useful insight for teachers and
administrators that are facing the same question. Rather than look to anecdotes
and opinions, there will be recent, hard data to help drive a decision. I think
that completing the project offers benefits to me besides the answer to a
question. What I am finding is that I entered the year with some
preconceptions, listened to colleagues (sometimes simply vent) then did some research
that is now causing me to rethink my position. I am looking forward to seeing if
the data I collect matches what has come before me. If it does not, then there’s
another source of inquiry.
