Take Action to Action Research

 

Don’t you sometimes find yourself thinking ‘Why are my students lazy?’ or ‘Why don’t they want to learn?’

Big problems to deal with, aren’t they?

So why not starting to find out more about your students by asking questions considering to make your problems solvable?

How?

Well, instead of complaining ‘Why are they sooooo lazy?’, we can start asking better question, such as ‘when do they respond me well?’ ‘What kind of tasks do they find boring?’ etc.

Action research is a great way to find your routes. It is a reflective process that helps teachers to examine their teaching and the conditions of their classes to find ways to change and improve the process. You  begin with identifying your problem by asking questions about your classroom experiences, challenges or problems then you continue collecting data, being observed by a colleague, reflecting on your own teaching and taking action to solve your problem.

Any teacher who wants to understand more about teaching and learning or who wants to develop her teaching skills and knowledge would find action research very useful. It is also a good way to start to become a life-long learner and a critical thinker as well as a creative problem-solver as each class will lead the teacher to find out more about teaching, behaviours, solving problems. Identifying your problem, students’ learning styles will enable you to draw a map to follow and reach your goals.

You can even start with the smallest problem you face and see how you end up.

Action research will enable teachers to make choices about their teaching styles, taking initiatives in the classroom.  It will also help to build a new way of team work as the teacher will need colleagues to observe her/him and reflect on their own teaching. Doing this, both the teacher of that specific group and the observer colleague will have a chance to think about their teaching and learn how to reflect.

If interested, you can find more about action research:

How to do action research in your classroom?

Improving Teaching through Classroom Action Research

Classroom Action Research

Classroom action research

Conducting action research in the foreign language classroom

Autonomy and self-direction in teacher training