Overall Reflections: Significance & Educational Implications
When I first took on this action research project, I had given relatively little thought to how it might impact my own educational practice. In retrospect, this project has provided me with invaluable lessons for my personal teaching practice.
- Plan backwards. In a perfect world, every lesson ever taught would be planned with the objective and assessment development first and everything else second. However, in the midst of meeting the many demands of research planning, student evaluation, and general day-to-day teaching, it is easy to lose sight of exactly what the goals are, be they large or small. This becomes particularly important when it comes to designing assessments and selecting data collection tools. Planning with an “objective-first” mindset helps to keep every step of the research student-centered.
- Be honest about the time commitment. This was perhaps the largest single difficulty throughout this project. I found an area of need among my students, I explored ways to address it, I designed multiple lessons and tools to target this need – but I did not take full account of how long it might take students to really progress in the ways that I had hoped. Closely examining the proposed timeline alongside the goals one hopes to achieve can spare logistical headaches and gaps in data later in the process.
- Be flexible. Although this is certainly easier said than done, it is important to be flexible and open in action research. Even with a small group size, any number of unforeseen challenges and twists can arise throughout the course of this type of research, and when one pours so much time, energy, and passion into a single project, it is easy to become rigid. I realized too late that I spent much of Phase I being too hung up on my own mental picture of how the lessons should go. Of course, I did not anticipate everything to go perfectly, but I tried to maintain so much control of the lessons themselves that I began to lose sight of the students. This only caused unnecessary stress for both my students and me. It took me awhile to realize that I needed to adjust my mental approach as well as my teaching approach in the lessons. Once I embraced the messiness of the research process, I was able to accept whatever challenges came up without sacrificing my focus – the students’ learning – or my sanity. These experiences reinforced to me that, counterintuitive though it might seem, allowing the research process to be fluid actually leads to a more authentic learning experience for student and researcher alike.