I enjoyed watching the videos of the three educational leaders and the action research that is going on in their school districts. It is always good to see what other school districts are doing. All three leaders had great advice. The one piece of advice that stood out for me was not to reinvent the wheel. Look at what other districts are doing and see how you can apply it to your district. I completely agree. Following that advice will save a lot of time.
Wonderings or inquiries come from observations and dilemmas that are faced in school. According to Dana, there are 9 different areas of passion that can be a starting point to help find your wonderings. They are staff development, curriculum development, individual teacher(s), individual student(s), school culture/community, leadership, management, school performance and social justice. By examining each of these areas, it is easy to come up with several wonderings. Often, we are so busy trying to meet deadlines that we don't take the time to think about them. If we just took the time, we would start the process on making our schools better through action research.
Dana, N. (2009). Leading with passion and knowledge the principal as action researcher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Debbie,
ReplyDeleteI also thought the "don't reinvent the wheel" comment was very helpful for this course! Hopefully knowing that little bit of advice will help us all from going crazy during this class! And, in doing the homework I thought of many more questions I could ask for my research topic, if only I had another couple months of summer I could look into all of them! But, like you said, if we take the time we could start to improve our schools one step at a time. Now I just have to take the time!