Action research for teacher development

Anil Pagoda Arachchi

It is inspiring to see that the National Institute of Education has initiated a very comprehensive project to involve a selected number of teachers and teacher advisors in doing action research aiming at their professional development under the guidance of Dr Godwin Kodithuwakku, himself a professional researcher and the Director of the Research Department and ADG of the Faculty of Languages, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Reading these reports not only enlighten us about the effectiveness and usefulness of the project but also throws light on to what can be done for the continuous professional development of teachers and enhancing the quality of their remedial teaching.

What is important about action research is that it is a very productive way of researching into one's own learning. In other words, it provides rich opportunities for the teachers to look at their own practice so that they can check whether what they implement brings in the expected results. Since action research basically focuses on the researcher himself, it involved teachers carefully thinking about what they do. This quality of action research makes teachers reflect on their own work in order to improve their practice through the learning they acquire from the research.

Action research is not merely doing activities; rather it is a form of practice that involves data gathering, reflection on the action, generating evidence from the data and making claims to knowledge based on the conclusions. Trying to find solutions for the problems teachers encounter in the classroom, from outside sources is of no use due to a number of reasons.

One important argument for this is that teachers’ problems are situational, and making therefore attempts to employ strategies practised elsewhere does not seem to bring in the expected results.

For example, students’ learning is to a great extent influenced by the socio-cultural factors found in the society they live in. One important feature of action research is that it is situational. Thus, action research provides real situations for the teachers to reflect and improve their own work and their own situations.

A different perspective

As was discussed elsewhere in this article, action research helps teachers interlink their reflection with classroom practice with a view to be professionally mature and to evaluating the effectiveness of their own work as a basis for further development. Another interesting phenomenon is that teachers gather data in relation to their own question so that they can productively involve in decision making for their own work. In addition to the self-reflection and self-evaluation, it allows space for collaboration that leads to create a critical community working towards a common goal.

It has been observed that teachers mainly learn from their colleagues rather than from other sources such as supervisors’ instructional role, books and magazines on teaching etc. In this context, collaborative action research is an immense help for the teachers to work together with common interests for their own professional development. Further, emancipatory interests found in action research help teachers free themselves from the dominating forces which control their knowledge and think independently of their own work. It is evident that teachers are expected to work in a politically constituted nature of their own social practice. Doing action research liberates teachers from their conditioned frame of reference for them to look at their own problems with innovative perspectives.

In action research, teachers review their own practice and identify the aspects they want to improve. This quality becomes significant because every problem a particular teacher faces is specific with its own characteristics. Since he finds facts regarding his problem, it creates opportunities for him to identify its nature in order to take action towards it. This understanding helps him imagine a way forward and implement it and take stocks of what happens in the classroom. He has a pre-planned set of measurements for him to evaluate how he progresses with his teaching and to reflect on it. The learning he gains from this in turn enables him to modify his plan and continue until he achieves his goals. These procedures reveal that action research contains a cycles of actions to be carried out until the expected results are obtained.

Euro-centric theories

It is a fact that application of educational theories and strategies imported from Europe to solve our own problems has not produced fruitful results, for the socio-political cultural conditions of the society tend to have a big impact on the teaching learning process.

In action research, there are ample avenues for the teachers to generate theories from the data they collect in implementing their own actions. It is these theories which help them find practical solutions for their problems.

There is no denying the fact that teachers at the grass roots level come in for innumerable problems related to their own social contexts.

Therefore, what the Department of Education can do in this respect is to take a policy decision to equip all the teachers in the country with the skills of doing action research.