Action Research Plan

Goal: To educate the staff on the importance of understanding cultural diversity and behavior of diverse learners as well as to implement behavior interventions for the diverse learners.

Action/Steps:

Identify the number of students that are frequently having discipline issues in class. Examine if the demographics of the students are those of A frican American, Hispanic, special education, economically disadvantaged

Person Responsible:

Principal, Assistant principal, teachers and students at Bowie Elementary

Timeline:

I would like to examine a 6 week period of students discipline referrals and then use a 6 week period to train, educate and implement behavior interventions with the classroom teachers for diverse learners.  Last I would like to monitor the progress over a 6 week period.  So the timeframe would be for at least semester term.

Needed Resources:

Discipline referrals

Documentation on the students behavior

Literature and studies about teaching the diverse learners

Evaluation:

The evaluation will be at the end of the semester to see if the number of discipline referrals have decreased for the diverse learners particularly those of 2 sub-groups African American and Hispanics

Importance of blogs

Blogs are very helpful to educators doing research because it’s another interactive way to communicate to one another about various different subject matters that can be done.

Action Research

I have learned that action research can be beneficial to an educator in many ways.  It allows you to research a topic of particular interest or challenge that you may face in your classroom, school or district and do research on it to help you as an educator.  This is not a research that is just assigned to you and has minimal or no relationship to you and you are expected to find an outcome and implement it in some way.  I think that you can gain many benefits from doing research like this because if you involve the individual that it directly effects than there will be greater chances that the individual will be more receptive to implementing the changes that are needed based on research.  In my seven years in the same school district I have worked in special education, five years as a speech therapist and two years as a special education teacher. As a speech therapist in my school district you can be assigned one or more campuses which in results I have been on 6 different campuses.  Each campus is very different and unique and has its own dynamics but one thing that I have noticed that all campuses have lacked is diversity in the staff members with a very diverse group of learners.  I feel this would be a great subject to do an action research for me and of great interest in comparison to my school district vs other surrounding districts.