Action Research Plan

Action Planning Template
Goal: For parents to become in integral part in their child’s education by increasing encouraging and increasing school-family-community involvement on campus.  To create more opportunities for parents to get involved on campus and create a more welcoming environment. Objectives: Establish reasons why there’s little or no parental involvement. 100% of our families feel welcome on there child’s campus
Action Steps(s):	Person(s) Responsible:	Timeline: Start/End	Needed Resources	Evaluation
1st - Meet with the PTA committee at my school to collaboratively discuss some reasons why they think parental involvement is low and steady decreasing on our campus.	Intern, principal, assistant principal, and the PTA committee	January 3, 2012- January 3, 2012	paper, pen	Meeting notes
2nd- Create a parental involvement survey and send it home with the students.	Intern principal, assistant principal, and the PTA committee	January 6,2012-january 10, 2012	Survey monkey	Survey results
3rd- Collect, analyze and present the data along with the PTA committee.	Intern, principal, assistant principal, PTA committee	January 12,2012-January 13, 2012	surveys	Analyze  and present the data
4th- Meet with the PTA committee and brainstorm different parental involvement activities.	Intern, principal, assistant principal, PTA committee	January 17,2012-January 17,2012	Pen and paper	Take notes and discuss suggestions.
5th-  Plan and prepare 5 Parent Nights meetings where parents will receive important and helpful information about their child’s education, environment and different ways they can become active parent volunteers on campus.  I will also have a compact for the parents to sign and one important thing is that they would volunteer at the school for one hour once a school year. I would inform and invite all parents out by email, phone, marquee, and newsletter for each parent night.	Intern, principal, assistant principal, PTA committee	Parent Nights: Jan. 2012 Feb. 2012 Mar. 2012 April 2012 May 2012	Volunteer log, Volunteer badges, Flyers for orientation, Power Point for orientation, school calendar, compact cards, Volunteer time from principal’s secretary and teachers who help with orientation.	I will keep track of how many compacts we receive. I will gather the numbers from the volunteer log to keep track of the increase or decrease of parent involvement. Parents will take a survey asking if they enjoyed volunteering, how it could be more beneficial and significant, what volunteer work they accomplished, if they filled out a compact card, and what would bring them back to volunteer again.
6th-  I would keep the parent volunteer sign in sheet in the front office and check it everyday and make a note on each  person compact card. Using this information I will do call outs to parents and remind them of the compact if the has not volunteered.	Intern and front office staff	January 3,2012- May 31,2012	Volunteer sign in sheet and compact cards, phone and pen	Monitor volunteer sign in sheet and compact cards
7th-Meet with the PTA committee and evaluate what worked and what didn’t work and ask for more suggestions for the next school year.	Intern, principal, assistant principal and the PTA committee	June 1, 2012	Pen and paper	Meeting notes

Reflection Week Two

This weeks lesson definitely helped me to finalize my action research topic.  Listening to Dr. Chargois, Johnny Briseno and Dr. Kirk Lewis was very informative and helped me with making my final decisions.  I also learned about the nine major areas leaders wonder about and came up with an action research topic for each of those nine major wonderings. 

Benefits of Leaders using Blogs

Educational leaders would benefit by using blogs, because it would be a helpful tool for inquiry and reflection.  Blogging is an excellent tool for communicating with colleagues on certain issues that need attention. Educational leaders can also use blogging as a journal tool.  Just being able to share and receive feed back will help tremendously on solving issues that a leader may face.

Action Research

Action research or administrator inquiry is a systematic approach to revising data, recognizing a problem, implementing a change based on research, and reflecting on the change that has been made and should involve everyone that's affected.  I've learned that action research should cause principals to slow down and take a look at their school if they want to be successful and continue to grow.  Action research can be an equally powerful mechanism for principals professional development and school improvement.  principals that engage in action research help principals surround themselves with other professionals engaged in a process that help them converse about practices in systematic and meaningful ways. Action research is one method for educators to be able to develop a research-based process for examining practice in schools, using additional data sources to foster improvements of student achievement at the school level and across the district. Action research may be conducted by a single person, however, after researching this topic that it's power can be more fully realized when done in collaboration with others.  I've learned that action research  is a process that consist of planning , researching and reflecting. Action research can be done on a regular basis by observing areas that need improvement in your schools .