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The
Action Research Laboratory is a professional development initiative for
teachers at Highland Park High School, Highland Park, Illinois, which
incorporates the process of collaborative action research.
The ARL (as the program is known) is a way to initiate change and to
increase student performance by developing the knowledge, skills, and
thinking of small groups of teachers. The ARL makes the process of
collaborative action research a natural way for teachers to perform.
Classrooms are not scientific laboratories in which all variables can be
controlled; classroom action research is NOT scientific research. Based
on the work of Richard Sagor in his ASCD publication, How to Conduct
Collaborative Action Research, each team of teachers in the ARL
moves through the process of conducting action research:
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First,
as a group of three with the assistance of a facilitator, the
teachers formulate a question or identify an area of inquiry that
they wish to research.
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Second,
they take action by doing something in their classroom to test out
their beliefs.
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Third,
while they take action, they collect data in a variety of ways.
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Fourth,
they analyze the data to test out the action that they took.
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And
last, they set new goals or raise new questions based on their
results.
Action
research is an iterative process. Once they learn it, teachers make it
the way they perform, grounding their teaching in clearly defined
questions, collaboration, and data analysis. This process creates and
sustains new relationships among professionals.
GOALS
As a professional development program, the Action Research Laboratory
has four goals:
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COLLABORATION:
to provide sufficient time for teachers to be able to reflect on
their classroom experiences and to consult with and share with other
teaching professionals;
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EXPERIMENTATION:
to provide the ways and means for teachers to entertain new ideas of
instruction, curriculum development, and assessment;
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RESEARCH-BASED:
to provide the support for teachers to put into practice what
educational research says will best help all students learn; and
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TEACHER
EMPOWERMENT/SCHOOL CHANGE: to provide a living laboratory for
the ARL teachers, their department members, and the faculty at large
to prove that best practices can and will make a good school better.
PROGRAM COMPONENTS
The
components of the program are relatively simple and can be easily
duplicated or adapted to other settings.
Because the ARL is committed to the process of COLLABORATIVE action
research, each team of three teachers in the ARL meets once a month for
a full day to do their work. In these sessions, teachers brainstorm
ideas, discuss readings, analyze data, and plan their next steps. At
first, teachers are wary of taking an entire day for these activities,
but, after only one session, they usually recognize the need and the
benefits of in-depth professional talk. These sessions take place off
campus so that no one is distracted by concerns about what is happening
"back in the classroom or office." Sessions often move from
place to place off-campus and have been held at local restaurants, at
participants' homes, and even at the local forest preserve or beach. As
long as the setting is comfortable and conducive to talk, any place can
do.
In addition, each team meets for one school period at some other time
during the month in order to "touch base"; during those short
meetings, team members provide updates, share progress, and sometimes
vent frustrations.
Because the ARL is a dynamic and adaptive form of professional
development, teams are free to adjust their participation from year to
year. So far, each team has found the experience valuable enough to
sustain their relationships, often encompassing the work of other ARL
teams and creating relationships outside of their own team.
With the growth of the ARL, teams sometimes meet with each other to
share their work and offer support and suggestions. This has been a
valuable component of stretching teachers in directions that they may
not have discovered on their own and in establishing new patterns of
professional relationships.
The members of a team must be from different departments. There are two
reasons for this. First, if team members are the only representative
from their department, each is the sole content expert on that team. In
this context, teachers are forced to talk about how to teach and why
teach rather than what to teach. Conversely, teachers from other
departments can and often do ask naive questions about subjects not
their own. These naive questions can cause teachers to think through
their own practices and their departmental practices with fresh eyes.
Second, by being with teachers from other departments, ARL participants
learn more about how the rest of the school works and what a student's
day is like. This broader perspective can lead teachers to think in new
and exciting ways. The artificial walls that schools erect between
disciplines begin to erode.
Each team has a facilitator. The original facilitator was the assistant
principal who began the ARL. Since then, teachers from established teams
have begun facilitating new teams. Once teachers have experienced the
ARL and have made collaborative action research a part of themselves,
they are in a position to serve their colleagues. This feature of the
ARL insures its continued growth because the program is not limited to
the number of teams one facilitator can work with.
The facilitator's job is to provide a loose structure for the meetings,
take care of meeting arrangements, and to listen. Because the ARL is
based on constructivist learning principles, the teachers are
responsible for their own learning. They decide how far and how fast to
go with their research. They collaborate and monitor each other's
progress. They encourage and support each other. Facilitators may offer
a comment, summarize a conversation, or provide a question, but their
job is to discover ways in which to support the ARL teachers' work. In
this way the facilitator is really conducting action research about
teacher development.
Classroom observations of other ARL teachers are another way to create a
community of learners within a team while breaking through classroom and
department isolation. It is not surprising that most teachers in a high
school only visit their own section of the building. After visiting each
other's classrooms, ARL teachers discover that they have a better
understanding of the similarities and differences between departments as
well as the structure of a student's day.
Doing action research is the cornerstone of the ARL. Teachers learn the
process of collaborative action research by doing it. In the throes of
their projects, they raise their own questions, ones that have meaning
and immediacy for them. They seek their own answers in their own
classrooms with their own students. The learning is truly job-embedded
because each teacher returns to a classroom ready to test out a belief.
After a short while teachers cannot separate action research from their
teaching. It becomes the way they teach.
Because the collaboration is so important to the ARL, teachers on a team
coordinate the ways in which they obtain additional professional
development. Teams have made visits to other schools and have attended
workshops and conferences together. These common experiences solidify
relationships, support extended learning, and nourish conversations and
understandings. When a team knows that it will be working together on
issues of common interest for more than a school year, the significance
of these professional activities grows immensely.
Finally, ARL teachers need structures in which to share their progress
with others. Because action research is primarily conducted for the
benefit of the teacher-researchers involved, it does not claim
replication. But that does not mean that action research does not have a
place in the serious discourse about teaching and learning. Teachers who
understand the importance of what they learn from their action research
want to share their results with other teachers. It is one important way
that educators can reduce the isolation inherent in the traditional
model of education while instilling the professionalism we strive for.
We call this "getting the word out."
ARL teachers informally share the results of their action research all
the time. They are resources for their departments and fellow teachers.
But they also require more formal ways in which to share their work.
They have presented their findings to other teachers in lunch meetings
and during inservices. They have presented their work to the local
school board and have begun presenting their work at local, state, and
national conferences. They have made presentations and initiated
dialogues at other schools and in university education classes.
In addition to making a commitment to presentations, teachers in the ARL
are required each year to write a report about what they have learned.
These reports not only serve to document their findings, but also compel
teachers to synthesize their work and to set new goals. ARL teachers
have made a serious commitment to "get the word out."
AREAS
OF INQUIRY
As of May 1998, the ARL consisted of four teams, each pursuing its own
area of interest. ARL Team #1 began by studying the effects of
project-based learning on student achievement; since then, they have
refined their focus to developing more effective ways to assess
projects, and recently have begun to make life applications to student
learning.
When it first formed, ARL Team #2 wanted to devise methods to emphasize
learning by de-emphasizing grades. Throughout the school year, team
members did not assign a letter or number grade to any student work
including quizzes and tests. This topic gave rise to teachers devising
new means of assessment. Most recently, they decided to investigate how
topics of ethics in their content play out in student thinking and
behaviors.
ARL Team #3 is studying the best ways to create a community of learners
in the classroom. From their initial efforts they are experimenting with
teaming across disciplines.
And ARL Team #4 is investigating ways to keep seniors engaged for the
entire year. Their work has led them to look at ways in which students
can extend their learning to the larger community. More teams are
expected to form this year.
ARL
Team #5 has been studying the effects on learning of creating a sense of
belonging in the classroom. Inspired by primary school teachers’
successes in engaging students, they want to recreate the enthusiasm
that small children have for school.
ARL
Team #7, consisting of administrators from the district office, has been
examining how they can create an atmosphere in which teachers and
administrators are open to new ideas and change. They are concentrating
on disseminating their findings to the larger community through writing.
DOCUMENTATION
The
Action Research Laboratory promotes student growth through teacher
growth. Ample documentation of both teacher and student growth has been
collected over the last few years. It takes many forms.
These include recorded and transcribed interviews with ARL participants
as well as the teachers' annual written reports. Over 350 parents of
students who have been in an ARL teacher's class have been interviewed
on the phone. With class discussions, surveys, and videotaped
interviews, students are constantly assessing the action research that
the teachers are conducting. And teacher observations by other ARL
teachers as well as administrators provide another data collection
point.
Student growth is assessed with both qualitative and quantitative means,
including student self-assessment, student surveys, parent phone
interviews, and data analysis including grade distributions and
attendance records.
The results of all this data collection and analysis have been
encouraging to say the least. Both teacher and student responses have
reinforced the idea that teachers using action research to improve their
own performance do have a positive impact on student growth and
organizational change. (See page 6 of this site.)
Here are some examples from the teachers' written reports:
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"I
am confident that my students have been able to learn more because
of my involvement in the Action Research Lab. . . . I think that
this year I really learned about myself as a teacher, I was able to
evaluate my own assumptions and beliefs about education. My ideas .
. . continue to evolve, and as they change I am able to meet
students' learning needs better."
(Christine McDaniel)
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"This
feeling of mutual commitment provided a wonderful staff development
experience; by working with these colleagues on a consistent basis
throughout the year, I was able to explore new ideas and take risks
in the classroom, with a type of "safety net" in
place."
(Lauren Fagel)
ARL teams continue to proliferate and experienced ARL team members are
facilitating new teams.
The ARL has clearly made a difference in the development of the teachers
who participate in it. Their growth and the effects of their
participation are well documented.
But the ARL teams have also proven to be a force for change within the
school. For example, the ARL was pivotal in the decision to organize the
entire faculty into learning teams that, for all practical purposes, are
loosely structured collaborative action research teams. Many teachers
use practices tested by ARL teachers, such as rubric formation, student
self-assessment, and de-emphasizing grades. ARL teachers have become
resources for other teachers within the school.
The ARL offers other schools a model for change that can enrich student
learning through the professional development efforts of a committed
group of teachers. These teachers want to share what they have learned
from their ARL work with the larger education community. They know that
the good work they do in the Action Research Laboratory can have an
impact beyond the doors of Highland Park High School.
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