Action Research Continued

This week I found out that there are a million different things that an educator might want to participate in an action research project. I have to admit that many of the topics I read about I have wondered about myself! How can we reach all students? How can peer coaching help both veteran and novice teachers? How can I as an administrator motivate teachers towards lifelong learning? What happens to students who are dismissed from intervention programs? And many other topics are of interest to me. Most importantly I learned that action research can be used to strengthen many different aspects of education: staff development, curriculum development, individual teachers, individual or groups of students, school community, leadership skills, management skills, school performance, and social justice. I also learned that it is important not to see action research as a way to control or change teacher behavior, but to use it to learn and understand behaviors and figure out how to work with those understandings.

From this week's learning, I believe I will do my action research on documentation of the RTI process. I hope to discover ways to help teachers streamline this process in order to have a clearer understanding of what is and isn't working for their struggling students.