Taking Action for Lifelong Learning

It should not come as a surprise that completion of your teaching training is the beginning of your learning journey and not the end. As a student, you learn what could make you a great teacher, but at work you will learn what makes you a great teacher. We can all read textbooks, continue to find new resources, and speak to colleagues, but as great as these forms of learning are nothing can over-shadow the value of action learning.

Brown & Lee (2014) describe action research as everything you will learn through the "informal everyday occurrence"(s) that happen in your classroom.  I believe that this type of research is the most valuable research a teacher can possibly obtain. Yes, our theoretical approaches are based on common practices, and have been proven to be effective. However, once we have learned the rules as students, our time will come to break them as teachers.

Theory is a good place to start, but as class ensues you will be lucky if the theory you start with remains effective. Instead, Davidoff & van den Berg (1990) suggest that we approach our classrooms with a 4 step research process to conduct effective action research. These steps include plan, teach/act, observe, and reflect (Davidoff & van den Berg, 1990). 

Your best teachers? They're not teachers at all!

Plan: When it comes to the first step of action research, Davidoff & van den Berg (1990) highlight that you first must identify the gaps in the theoretical teaching process you started your class with. While planning every lesson is important, it is also important to embrace the possibility that things might change. This is especially important if you ever intend to teach within a cultural context that is vastly different than the one that you are used to. Jalali-Tehrani (2017)  discusses how her decision to embrace action research was born from the need to deviate from her original lesson plans. This type of "flexibility born from necessity" (Jalali-Tehrani, 2017) could easily be the identified problem that you apply Davidoff & van den Berg (1990)'s 4 step process to. Of course, expected problem areas such as student attentiveness, homework habits, etc. may be potential problem areas as well, but be aware that the identified gap in your initial practice may be a gap in your understanding, not theirs. John Dewey (n.d.) on TeachingEnglish.org provides a useful resource on ideas regarding how you can tell there is a problem and how to assess if your re-evaluation has worked.

Teach, Act, and Observe:  Once you've realized there is a problem, and considered possible ways to solve it, it's time to experiment! Observational learning is a big component of action research and how you conduct it should be a combination of being attentive to your students' behaviour and using some hard assignment guidelines to assess your effectiveness. The Center for Education Innovation (2016) provides a resource list of ideas on how a teacher can effectively enact the observation step in the action research process. 


Reflect: After you've acted and observed, was your new plan effective? If so, congratulations you've learned something! If not, well, you've also learned something. Amazingly, the 4 step process is a circle not a line. Once you're satisfied with your reflection stage, it's time to go back to the planning stage to either re-assess your method or build upon what you've discovered works.

In many ways, your time as a student is never over, even if you've dropped the title of being one. The best teachers are ones that recognize that part of their job is to be educated as much as it is to educate. You've learned a lot as a student, and now it's time to learn even more from the students you are about to meet.