An Effective Campus Looks at ALL Areas

Dana discusses nine specific effective inquiry and action research areas of responsibilities to guide school administrators in assessing their own practices that have a considerable impact on campus and student achievement (Dana, 2009). They are as follows:

1. Staff development
2. Curriculum development
3. Individual teacher(s)
4. Individual student(s)
5. School culture/community
6. Leadership
7. Management
8. School performance
9. Social justice

Staff development is critical to the growth of a campus.  Oftentimes staff development can be nothing more than a ‘shotgun approach’ to learning.  Fancy named topics and the latest teaching fad or technology piece are often used with hopes that a staff will benefit from something taught.  A good use of action research for staff development might be to do a staff survey at the end of a given school year on good motivational techniques.  Research could be done over the summer as well from an administrative standpoint, and when the staff reconvenes after the summer a session of professional development on motivational techniques in the classroom could be done.  This could be followed up throughout the year and monitored as well during classroom walkthroughs and observations.  Departments could also use this as topics for PLC discussions throughout the year as well.  Staff development is vital to individual and campus growth.

Curriculum development is the backbone to effective learning in the classroom.  In my view, creating a curriculum without doing research would prove very ineffective.  A good research project would be to research different sets of curriculum for a given subject.  Compare different performance goals and learning objectives throughout.  Then correlate these goals and learning objectives to the current ones in your specific departments within the district or campus.  Look at performance based assessments (if possible) that go along with these curriculums.  Discuss as a team of curriculum developers what aspects would be beneficial for your goals.

Individual teacher research should be done on a regular basis.  This is where self-actualization occurs.  Being able to identify areas of improvement as an individual and how to improve is vital to becoming an expert in a given field.  A good example of individual teacher research would be a teacher realizing that they need to be better with behavior management in the classroom.  The teacher could work with administrators to identify others on campus that are able to effectively manage a classroom.  Both the administrator and teacher could perform walkthroughs in these classrooms and identify common qualities each of these professionals possesses.  The teacher could work on implementing these qualities in their own classroom and then measure the results. 

The fourth area mentioned is individual students.  It is important to realize that each individual student is different and that their needs are thus different.  An example of action research for an individual student might be to look at effective ways to give an assessment for an ESL student.  The teacher might work with the ESL teacher and quite possibly the LOTE department to determine methods that would be appropriate.

School culture/ community involve looking at a campus as a whole.  An example of action research for the student community might be looking at the demographics of students involved in extracurricular activities to determine participation amongst certain minority groups.  This data could be used to determine whether these groups are involved substantially enough in activities at school.  Other case studies can be looked at as well to help determine why these groups might not be involved as much.

Leadership is one of the most important qualities in any practitioner.  An example of leadership research might be for administrators to do a book study using a text that a principal has found beneficial in the past.  The study could be done over a allotted time period in which the group of administrators would meet on a regular basis to discuss. 

Management, like leadership, is an important quality amongst practitioners.  A principal might research different quality management techniques employed by large corporations to determine which ones might be most effective on a campus of over 250 staff members. 

School performance is one of the areas that is looked at very frequently.  Oftentimes this comes in the form of standardized testing or a rating system for a school.  A principal might organize a committee made up of teachers and administrators to determine effective methods of helping students that have failed the TAKS test. 

Social Justice is justice exercised within a society.  It is important for all faculty and staff on campus to understand differences in social classes and how they interact.  A good example of action research in social justice would be to determine whether students from a low economic background are given equal opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities.  Social justice is important in that it gives every student the equal opportunity to succeed.