Week 5 Discussion

Please share the following with your classmates for this week’s discussion:

As you look back on what you learned during the past five weeks in our action research course:

• Please share one specific topic of your greatest insight or new learning – what really caught your interest.
• Please share one specific area where you still want to learn more.
• For the area/topic you identified in Part (b), please state what you will do to continue to build your applied knowledge in this area.

I really enjoyed learning about the different strategies that support and sustain action research. I found many of them to be enlightening.  I think that  these will prove to be very beneficial when I am an administrator in the future and in need of initiating change for overall school improvement.
Specifically, I would like to learn more about ways to effectively collect data for various research projects.  We've learned about how to select a good topic and how to start to implement it, but I think that I need a little more guidance on various ways to select important data-collecting methods. 
I will continue to build my learning on the previously discussed topic by continuously talking to my site supervisor, classmates, peer teachers, professors, by researching, etc. 

Updated Action Research Plan

Action Planning Template
Goal: My goal is to discover if extrinsic or intrinsic motivational techniques work more effectively at the student level.  I plan to also discover if motivation at the student level and teacher level affect one another’s performance.
Action Steps(s):	Person(s) Responsible:	Timeline: Start/End	Needed Resources	Evaluation
Initially poll sample size of students regarding what motivates them	Shawna Walker Site supervisor	Start: August 2013	Created polls	Look for patterns among students
Review polls	Shawna Walker Site Supervisor	August 2013	Gathered polls	summarize what technique is the most commonly desired among the students-analyze data by comparing it to outside research-are there any patterns in found results?
Introduce involved parties to a system that will implement an extrinsic motivation technique (rewarding with candy, etc)	Shawna Walker Site Supervisor	September 2013	Outside articles focusing on extrinsic motivation techniques	Complete observations, focus groups, etc. periodically
Note progress among individual levels or lack there of periodically by interviewing, observing, etc	Shawna Walker Site Supervisor	October 2013	Increase in attendance records, behavior improvements	Interviewing
Introduce involved parties to a system that will implement an intrinsic motivation technique (focusing on self-improvement, etc)	Shawna Walker	Mid October 2013	Outside articles focusing on intrinsic  motivation techniques	Complete observations, focus groups, etc. periodically
Note progress among individual levels or lack there of periodically by interviewing, observing, etc	Shawna Walker Site Supervisor	Mid November 2013	Increase in attendance records, behavior improvements	Interviewing
Poll students and teachers regarding how  motivation levels affect them (how does a teacher’s motivation affect students and vs)	Shawna Walker Site Supervisor	December 2013	Created polls	Look for patterns within results
Analyze data to determine which motivational techniques were the most effective Share findings with peer teachers, classmates, and administrators	Shawna Walker Site Supervisor	January 2014	All data (observations, polls, etc)	Self-assess am I actually finding my desired information? What can I do to increase the productivity of this plan? Are my planned activities working or do I need to make adjustments? Am I asking the appropriate questions?

My student sample will come from my homeroom class.  As far as the teachers portion of my study, I will randomly select 15 teachers to poll.