Week 21 - Develop your action plan (Learn)

Linking your Research Essay to your Action Plan

For the past week, we have been looking at how analysing and critiquing the research literature gives you insights into what has been studied in your area of focus. The process of working on your Research Essay should provide you with specific questions for your inquiry.

In this week and the following ones, following up on your inquiry questions, you are going to develop your Action Plan by considering what actions you will need to take and when, what data collection methods you need to use, designing the data collection tools and integrating Kaupapa Māori in your inquiry, then finally discussing the potential impacts.

When will you take action?

Remember that at this stage, you develop the Action Plan but are not yet taking action. This week we are still in the “Learn” phase of the Spiral of Inquiry. Using the new learning you gained from the literature in the Research essay, you are now, as Kaser and Halbert (2017) suggest, tailoring the new learning to your context by planning your inquiry.

For this Action plan (Research 2) assessment, you are not required to actually collect any data yet. The plan should be carefully designed so that you will be able to implement it during the last 8 weeks of the programme (Applied Practice in Context course) while reflecting on different aspects of the implementation (these aspects will be introduced the last 8 weeks).

What does your action plan look like?

The Action Plan template for a video, and Action Plan template for a written document provide a framework for the key components of the action plan that you need to cover. If you haven’t already made a copy of either of these templates (in week 16 and week 17), you should do it now as we will look at each component more closely in this week’s and the following weeks’ class notes. Even if you don't use one of the templates directly, they contain useful guidelines for what should be in your action plan.

Define your community(ies)

This part relates to the criterion 1 of RESEARCH 2

To start your plan, you need to clearly identify the communities that you will be engaging with in your inquiry by answering the questions: Who will be involved? Why have you chosen to engage with them? What is the context for the communities? How will you engage with your community? Already in week 17 you investigated the needs of your communities. In this inquiry plan, you can decide to engage with the same communities or narrow your focus to fewer communities or extend to reach out to more communities. You may engage with one community or more throughout the inquiry (for example, engaging with students and other teachers for implementing new pedagogy, collecting data and discussing findings) or you can engage with different communities at different phases of your inquiry, for example, consulting with a head of department before implementing a new teaching approach; working with and collecting data from your students and colleagues, sharing the results with your school and whanau at the end.

Now, make a list of the communities you will engage with and add this to your e-Portfolio, together with some explanatory notes of why and how you would engage with them.

Defining the key terms in your inquiry questions

This part relates to criterion 2 of RESEARCH 2

Your action plan should clearly lay out what needs to be considered and to be done, how and when and who would be involved. These are to be developed based on what your inquiry question is.

Remember that while it’s not advisable to completely change the direction of your inquiry, it is possible that certain aspects in your proposed inquiry questions could be modified when you develop your action plan to suit the specific situation that you have not been able to foresee in previous stages.

As your action plan is guided by your inquiry question(s), it is important to clearly define the terms in your question. You can do this by drawing on the resources you have reviewed in your Research Essay to define the key terms and explaining how those terms are translated into practice in your inquiry.

For example, “learner agency” can be defined as learners feeling that they are in control of, and active participants in, their learning (Ministry of Education, 2016) and intentionally make choices and act on those choices responsibly (Knight, Barbera & Appel, 2017). In practice, it might be that students are able to negotiate their learning goals and choose the digital devices that they feel fit to use for different types of learning activities. Another example is about “gamification”. Deterding, Dixon, Khaled and Nacke (2011) defined gamification as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (p.10). In practice, it might be that writing activities are designed with different difficulty levels and students earn an achievement badge once they complete a level.

Now, list the key terms in your research questions, defining the key terms using the relevant resources, then explain what they will look like in your practice when you carry out your inquiry. Add those notes to your e-Portfolio.

Your actions and timeframe

This relates to criterion 2 of RESEARCH 2

Having defined the key terms in your inquiry questions, you should have a clearer idea of what you could plan to implement in your practice. The actions and timeframe you need to specify in your Action Plan should be specific in terms of their purpose including who will be involved, when and what resources are needed. The actions should also include when you collect data and from whom. You don’t have to explain the data collection methods and tools in detail when presenting the actions and timeframe section as there will be a separate part in the Action Plan where you will discuss that in more depth (more information about data collection methods and tools will be discussed in week 23’s class notes). Always consider how these actions will help to address your inquiry question(s) or if you need to adjust your question(s) to scale down your inquiry.

Below is an outline of what your actions and time frame might look like. Depending on your context, you can adjust it to use more or less time to carry out a given action.

Inquiry question: To what extent does [particular digital or collaborative innovation] impact on engagement/outcomes/ in [subject area] for [year or level or particular priority learners] at (school name)?

Actions	Timeframe
Inform the relevant communities (list the communities, in what ways will you inform them	Week 1
Collect student baseline data (indicate which tool will be used)	Week 1 or week 2
Describe specific teaching and learning activities related to the particular digital or collaborative innovation you will carry out	Week 2,3,4,5.
Collect endpoint data	Week 5
Analyse data	Week 6

During the first 3 minutes of the Plan your action video (supplementary), Margaret Riel recommends the logic model as one of the tools to help work out a plan of actions. The logic model consists of 3 key elements: inputs (Resources), outputs (Actions), outcomes (Impacts). When you plan your actions, knowing your inputs (the resources such as available learning materials, collegial support etc) and the outcomes (the impacts you would like to see such student skills improved) would help you to consider the suitable actions you need to take.

Now in your e-Portfolio make a list of the actions you could carry out for your inquiry, describing what has to be done, who should be involved, what resources you need and how long each action might take. Check if you can fit all of the actions in the plan so that you can finish the action by week 30. If not, you need to reduce the actions and/or engage with fewer members of the communities for each action. Reach out to your colleagues, leadership teams or your Mind Lab peers to seek feedback about the actions and their timeframe.

Integrating the Principles of Kaupapa Māori into your Teacher Inquiry

As you define the communities, remember to consider a Kaupapa Māori approach in the process. As an example, this week's class notes look at the Whānau - the family structure principle and the question that you can consider is:

• To what extent will the students’ whānau be involved in the inquiry?

You can select any other principle and raise your own questions as well.

Write down some key ideas to answer the question in your e-Portfolio.

Checking You’ve Done All That Was Required for This Week

The Tasks-list on the next tab helps you to check you have done all the required activities.

References

Knight, J., Barbera, E. & Appel, C. (2017). A framework for learner agency in online spoken interaction tasks. ReCALL : The Journal of EUROCALL, 29(3), 276-293. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S095834401700009X

Ministry of Education. (2016). Learner agency. Retrieved from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-resources/NZC-Online-blog/Learner-agency

Deterding, S., Dixon, D.,Khaled, R. & Nacke, L.(2011).From game design elements to gamefulness: defining "gamification".Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments(pp. 9-15). Findland: Tampere.