Week 2 - AR Project

This week marks the end of one of the most challenging experiences I have ever faced. For the past nine months I have battled this horrible desease known as my action research project. While I am not completely satisfied with the end product of my project, I am ecstatic that it is finally completed.

From the start I struggled with this project. I changed my essential question/problem three times and ended up re-writing my literature twice. Thanks to the guidance of Roxanne, I ended up arriving at my essential goal of training teachers how to implement technology into their lesson plans. However, as I later learned from my literature review, I went about implementing in the wrong way. I did everything that you shouldn't do when trying to use professional development to help teachers integrate technology into their lesson plans. One of the reasons for this error was that I changed my literature after I was into my cycles. Having this information ahead of time, I would have reshaped the way my cycles were implemented.

Even though my cycles were done incorrectly, it still validated what my literature suggested and taught me a lot about professional development. However, one of the greatest outcomes of this experience was the fact that I have no moved into a different role at my school. Actually, it is a role I hold now, Director of Technology, but I am finally going to be given the opportunity to focus 100% of my time on the position. Currently I teach, oversee the school network and hold the tech position. Next year, while I will still have one class before school, I will finally have someone under me maintaining the network and I can focus on technology integration at the school.

In the end, even though my research project was a flop, I owe my current success at school to the process of undergoing the mind numbing pain I experienced over the past nine months. My administration saw a real need for my position to be full time and have the confidence in my to be a real change.