This course was very valuable and extremely rigorous! I am amazed at all of the work I have put into formulating and reformulating my action research plan. My site supervisor and Dr. Abshire have been extremely helpful and flexible throughout the process. We were assigned meaningful text, valuable resources, and various ways to communicate with our peers to assist us in our journey, and I am very pleased with the quality and content of this course. Here are a couple of things that I enjoyed about this course.
Action research is a topic that I was not familiar with before beginning this course. As educators we often discuss problems present in education and toss around ideas about what ways to improve learning in the classroom but never did I imagine that I would actually conduct research to validate these issues. Now that I’ve learned the importance of action research as an educator, I will never look at issues in education the same! My role in action research from this point on will be ongoing just as we have read in our assigned text.
One of the major components of this course was sharing our research plan with others. I have to say that this was probably one of the best parts of this course. In developing my action research plan, I found the discussion boards to be especially helpful. When I was confused about what direction my plan was taking I remember looking through the plans formulated by my peers, and I was able to get some ideas about my own plan and how to improve it. When my plan was finally composed, I was able to share it with others so that I could gain constructive criticism about areas that needed to be adjusted to better my plan.
Blogging is another tool that was helpful in formulating my research plan. Although I did not gain as much feedback from this source as I did from the discussion boards, I have become familiar with how to construct a blog and it has been interesting to learn a new way to share information with others over the web. I am still adjusting to the idea of blogging, but I feel that as I continue to follow more blogs and have others follow me then interacting with my peers will motivate me to check in on the blog regularly.
One of the aspects of this course that I regret not participating more in were the web conferences. My responsibilities at work have grown exponentially over the past year due to last year’s budget cuts in education. I am part counselor, part administrator, part secretary, and part everything else that you could possibly think of. I wish I had more time to actively participate in these web conferences because I gained a lot from the first one that I was able to join. I hope to do a better job of managing my time in future courses so that I can take full advantage of web conferences that are offered in my future courses.
Overall, I will use the tools that I learned in this course to build on my action research plan as future administrator. I have always considered myself as a lifelong learner, and I am thrilled at the idea of researching issues in a profession that I am extremely passionate about. Who knows? Maybe you’ll see my research published one day!
