Participatory Action Research for Educational Leadership

Using Data-Driven Decision Making to Improve Schools

E. Alana James, Margaret T. Milenkiewicz, Alan J. Bucknam

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781506319872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Follow the author on Twitter!
Alana James has a new twitter feed titled AR4Everything, which covers action research and reports on interesting facts.

"Finally we have a data-driven text on participatory action research for educational leaders. Through thoughtful examples and guided instruction, this text makes the case that the complex issues of today and tomorrow require multifaceted, rigorous, and results-oriented processes best undertaken through partnerships between educators and the communities they serve."

— Darlyne Bailey, Dean and Assistant to the President, University of Minnesota

"This book includes a very useful hands-on approach to developing a PAR project. It is written in a manner that is accessible to teachers, it is detailed enough to provide clear descriptions, and the exercises at the end of each chapter help readers to implement the new material."

—Elizabeth Grassi, Regis University

"In a clear manner, this text provides the tools necessary to conduct collaborative action research in order to create needed change in our classrooms and schools. Using this book, teachers, administrators, parents, and students can become active participants in the movement toward educational change."

— Emma Fuentes, University of San Francisco

The participatory action research (PAR) process discussed in the text represents the next evolutionary stage for action research and practitioner research in education. Authors E. Alana James, Margaret T. Milenkiewicz, and Alan Bucknam provide a readable overview of the PAR process similar to professional learning communities in schools. This fresh approach to participatory action research fully integrates process with research methodology. The results of the original PAR study and continued work with educational leaders propose that this "And/Both" approach ultimately produces the effect that school leaders seek and appreciate.

Key Features

• Guides the reader through the PAR steps with a graphically illustrated process: The book's design reaches out to visual learners with graphic elements while employing a research logic model that helps ensure rigorous research methodology.
• Provides reflective questions preceding each section: The questions increase the reflective practices and routines of the reader as appropriate to the PAR process.
• Presents real-world examples: Practitioner stories make the lessons real and alleviate the emotional unease that comes from tackling research practices for the first time.
• Offers tasks for working both in teams and as individuals: These tools aid participatory teams in working toward consensus and strong research designs.

Intended Audience

This is an ideal core text for graduate courses such as Action Research for School Improvement, Research for Educational Practitioners, Practitioner Research, and Teacher as Researcher in departments of education. It can also be used as a supplemental text in other research methods courses and in data-driven decision-making courses.

Meet author Alan Bucknam! http://www.notchcode.com/

CHAPTER 1

---

The Participatory Action Research Model

Participatory action research (PAR) is a dynamic process for personal and professional development. This tool, in the hands of attentive school administrators, teachers, and their communities, often produces emancipatory results, engaging many partners in the process of school development and reform. This book will help guide readers through the process of PAR and discuss its connection to the world of educational leadership.

Concerned educators in today’s schools focus on continuous academic improvement. Their initial inquiries may start with “I wonder if. . . ?” “How can we . . . ?” “Why don’t I. . . ?” or “Will it be effective to . . . ?” PAR, as a change process, requires educators to work with others to build data-driven decisions into the core of their practice. As a result, they work for the betterment of students and the welfare of their local school communities.

In a “growing rural town in the southwestern United States,” a middle school of 650 students, 12% of whom were identified special needs, used PAR in a yearlong school project to improve educational practices in inclusion classes (Saurino et al., 1996). The outcome of the project included three policy-level suggestions to include special needs students in classrooms during the morning hours, with a student ratio that was comprised of enough above-average students to act as peer mentors and as few inclusion students as practical. In a tertiary outcome of the project, staff reported a greater understanding of the diverse opinions among their colleagues. The awareness led to a more unified approach to a key issue. The efficacy of PAR as a tool for professional development was studied by independent researchers who concluded that PAR “served as a form of self reflective questions which enabled practitioners to better understand and solve problems of interest to them in their own education setting” (Saurino et al., 1996).

The action research (AR) portion of PAR is defined as a multistage type of research designed to yield practical results capable of improving a specific aspect of practice and made public to enable scrutiny and testing. This iterative process is bolstered through the strategic use of standard research methods—but AR differs from scientific research practices in a number of ways. The traditional view of scientific research sees research as a distinct and measurable construct in which scientists must remain neutral, without directly influencing the results of their experiments. PAR blends participatory research, defined as research conducted in circumstances where diverse practitioners work together to achieve reliable results. In local context this implies groups of citizens who have an equal say in all the aspects of the study. PAR offers a practical and effective approach for educators to study, assess, and improve their own practices, because PAR researchers intentionally make positive changes through the action cycle as they progress with the project. While the scientific view insists on absolute quantifia-bility, the PAR view appreciates subjective reflection as a form of data, giving credence and respect to intuitively driven moments and epiphanies.

We are particularly enthusiastic about this methodology because it includes collaborative participation and increased involvement of multiple factions within the school community as part of the problem-solving effort. In an example from a national project that we facilitate—an initiative focused on the improvement of education for students experiencing homelessness or high levels of mobility (H&HM)—Lowry Elementary School in Denver, Colorado, hosted a PAR project during the 2005–2006 school year. Involved in the PAR study were the principal, four teachers, and a woman who worked for Colorado’s Coalition for the Homeless. While six different projects emerged from the PAR team, most efforts centered on improving aspects of the homework process for students experiencing transience. The community person developed a program for parents who have recently been homeless to help their children with homework. This program was aided by teachers from Lowry Elementary. The teachers in the group focused on either improving homework in their classes or ensuring that notices from school were translated for Spanish-speaking families to promote their involvement. The principal in this study focused on developing protocols within the school that welcomed families midyear and aided their participation in their children’s education.

REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS

---

As mentioned in the Introduction, throughout this book each section will begin with reflective questions aimed at initiating the thought process about the topics within the particular section. PAR practitioners may choose to use these reflections to assist them in recording their process in a reflective journal. These reflections can later be used as qualitative data as appropriate to the practitioners’ final projects.

• What concerns do you have about your school community?
• What process would you use to address these issues?
• How would you gather data to measure the problem and your solutions to it?
• How would you keep track of your process and outcomes?

SECTION 1: PAR—A TOOL FOR CHANGE

---

The history of PAR started in the early 20th century with the work of Kurt Lewin (Coghlan & Brannick, 2001). Lewin’s work, called AR, was concerned with iterative cycles of investigation to improve the efficiencies of organizations. In the United States, it fell out of favor for a few decades because of the predominant focus on quantitative studies. Rediscovered in the 1970s (McKernan, 1996), PAR is practiced worldwide for both professional and organizational development. It has demonstrated itself to be particularly efficacious in the realm of curricular development (Elliott, 1991; McKernan, 1996; Zuber-Skerritt, 1992). While there are several subcategories of AR, the participatory model stressed in this text employs the strength of learning communities (Bray, Lee, Smith, & Yorks, 2000; Shapiro & Levine, 1999) related to group learning and data-driven decision making. A pioneer of AR, when writing about the field of education, stated:

We shall only teach better if we learn intelligently from the experience of shortfall; both in our grasp of the knowledge we offer and our knowledge of how to offer it. That is the case for research as the basis for teaching. (Stenhouse, 1983)

PAR as a Tool for Educational Leadership

PAR, on the other hand, has a long history of use outside the United States (Africa, Latin America, Canada). One strand of this tradition has become focused on teachers and other educational practitioners, some of whom work individually on AR or practitioner research projects, while some participate as teams. Although these variations are similar, and hold the same basic philosophy, AR has often focused on a specific issue as a means to improve teacher practice. PAR (historically) was the term researchers used when the study focused on an issue that directly affected a community. People in the community would work together collaboratively to conduct the research and the necessary actions to correct the situation. As mentioned in the Introduction, the communal nature of education and the need educators have to work in groups outside the small company of colleagues in their school buildings led this book to embrace PAR as a means of both focusing on an issue to improve education and expanding the collegial base of the study to larger groups of educators, preferably working with community members, as well.

Three attributes that contribute to the efficacy of PAR for educators are as follows:

1. The participatory elements of PAR aid in building a community of practice in schools (Wenger, McDermott,&Snyder, 2002).
2. PAR is a means of professional development that involves a wide variety of stakeholders in the improvement of educational practice.
3. The above-mentioned qualities significantly improve the involvement, expertise, and sense of professionalism in PAR practitioners (Greenwood&Levin, 1998; James, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Zuber-Skerritt, 1992).

A community of practice is defined as “a group of people who share a concern, set of problems or passion and who deepen their knowledge and expertise through regular interaction” (Wenger, 2004, p. 4). The process is democratizing and engages participants to seek solutions for problems they face. Greenwood and Levin (1998) complement the work of Paulo Freire (1986) and his pedagogy of adult literacy as a means for oppressed people to engage actively and to find a democratic voice within their environments. One measurable outcome for this research framework relates to the increase in participants’ professional capacity and control over their own situations (Zuber-Skerritt, 1992).

A community of practice developed in the Vancouver (British Columbia) School District as the school district worked to implement “substantial changes in pedagogy, school organization, and professional development” in order to address language issues brought to the fore by changing community demographics (Early, 2001, p. 174). Early reported on a single-school case study for the second phase of the language issue project. The school chosen for her report had a school population where 70% of the students spoke at home 1 of 20 different languages other than English. The collaborative or participatory work for the project included the school’s ESL and content teachers working together. This mutual process proved so successful that it continued after the project was over. Because of the nature of AR, the specific ESL processes implemented were specific to the teams of teachers developing them. Early concludes that the process was successful in drawing the attention of teachers to the role of language as a medium of learning in education for all students, and to intentionally plan for greater support between language development and educational development (2001, p. 175).

PAR is a relevant form of professional development for educators and community members because it considers both the context and the content of the issues being studied. While other forms of research set up controlled studies to focus their studies, PAR projects focus on phenomena within the community and school context in which they occur.

Reports produced from PAR studies are intended for a specific constituency, often within the educators’ local context, school, or school district. This does not preclude the applicability of PAR findings to state and national educational issues, which are described in Chapters 10 and 11. The reports allow other administrators and teachers to compare and contrast contextual elements and draw their own conclusions about the validity, credibility, and application of the process/outcomes to their own schools and classrooms. PAR outcomes, when used as professional development for educators, are outlined in Table 1.1.

Finally, it is the purpose of professional development to leave...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Participatory Action Research Model
• 2. The Tenets of PAR: Ethics, Purpose, and Logic
• 3. Starting to Research
• 4. Qualitative Data Collection
• 5. Qualitative Analysis
• 6. Quantitative Evidence
• 7. Taking and Measuring Action
• 8. Cycles of PAR: The Power of the Iterative Process
• 9. Final Analysis and Results
• 10. The Final Report
• 11. PAR for Educational Leadership
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• About the Authors