What is action research & how can I use it?

When I first saw that the week 1 assignment was about administrative inquiry or action research, I thought two things. The first question was what is action research anyway? The other thought was that I was in over my head in this program. Now I know the basics about action research. It is a type of research done by actual practitioners like teachers or principals. They determine a situation that needs improvement, usually something regarding student achievement. Then they move through researching the problem in the course of their everyday activities. They also reflect on the problem in multiple ways. Then they determine what the solution will be and implement it. Action research is “a systematic approach to improvement based on the process of inquiry and use of diagnostic data from multiple sources.” (Harris, 2010) The reason this type of inquiry or research is so valuable is that it is not done by people who are no longer in a school environment or have never been there. It is done by people who are actually in schools every day. My school has been very big on talking about Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) for a few years, but I never really understood exactly what they meant by it. Now I know that it is just a “small group of faculty members who meet regularly to discuss more effective learning and teaching practices.” (Dana, 2009) This would be exactly what we have been doing in my department by not only meeting about what we are doing in the classroom, but sharing ideas and experiences to make our teaching more effective. In this way, teachers are learning from each other at these meetings instead of just talking about what they are going to do each day in class. I think this could be used in my teaching career by finding a student achievement problem and coming up with an action research plan to investigate it. In that way I would be using my own experiences each day as I investigate the issue and have my students and colleagues help me discover the answers. I think I would use it to study the effectiveness of a particular strategy or implementation of a certain technology. As far as the other question, yes I still think I might be over my head sometimes, but I am forging onward, hoping to learn something along the way!