This class was exactly what I needed to create some ideas for my job this coming year. I was wondering how I was going to accomplish my task of dealing with attendance rates and truancies in my school. This class not only provided me with the structure I needed to accomplish the task it gave me insight as to what the question was and where the answers might be.
I was excited when I heard Dr. Chargois’s video where he spoke about a research grant that will show their teachers how to use data driven information, so teacher can make impact tomorrow, not next year. Teachers being taught to use computer programs to access the data and manipulate it to gain a greater understanding of how to help student gain success quicker, and to make changes more systemic in nature, learning how to quantify qualitative data. New research areas of affective teacher’s vs., in effective teacher and how it will affect students. This research should help in the disaggregation of quantitative records, such as TAKS, AP and EOC tests that I will need. In another video Dr. Lewis spoke of a research grant from Melinda and Bill Gates foundation. It is dealing with methods to increase the success rates of graduating seniors. He spoke about using this data from the student’s freshmen year to the Senior year in order to gain an understanding of what needed to be changed over time in order for the student to be more successful in today’s ever changing world. Dr. Lewis also spoke about taking other people research already done and see if all pieces of it would be beneficial to research the district is doing on its own. Dr. Lewis is on the mark with his thinking. In order for us to teach to today’s innovative and complex students we must find new a varying ways to reach and hold them.
In developing a research plan I found the structure of the assignment to be exactly what I had been looking for in order to achieve my goals of raising attendance rates and lowering truancies in our school. I can identify our goals and objectives/outcomes of the research investigation, design activities to achieve those objectives, gather the resources and research tools needed for data gathering, get a reasonable timeline for completion, assign people responsible for implementation of the action research plan and provide a plan for monitoring the achievement of goals and objectives
(Harris, S., Edmonson, S., and Combs, J. (2010). Examining what we do to improve our schools: 8 steps to improve our schools. p. 85,)

Kurt Lewin’s development of Force Field Analysis where he believed that there are forces that drive change and forces that are resistant to change, in order for adjustments to occur the driving forces must exceed the resistant forces was a real awakening for me . Our staff must change the way we do things in order for us to reduce truancies in our school. We acknowledge that we have an attendance and truancy problem. What we as a staff can do to change the truancy problem. Know what will happen if no change occurs. Identify forces driving the proposed change. Who or what is or will be resisting the change. Is change feasible, and if so how can we reduce the strength of forces opposing the alteration? Or we can use other methods such as the Delphi Method which is a decision making tools that works effectively for a larger group of stakeholders. This method will be an effective tool if the participants have a vested interest in the outcome, and are willing to participate in the decision making process. Which I hope will occur if I can get some investment in the project. This process also taught me the value of a survey conducted by a facilitator, with feedback and motivations given to the participants you could be able to Identify a problem, request possible solutions, post responses to participants, provide a summary of possible solutions, and ask participants to rank solutions and tally responses. The last technique called Nominal group is a brainstorming, decision making process that allows group members to assess possible needs by using an impartial system of input, followed by discussion, and then ranking the importance of each need. This method emphasizes equal opportunities for each participant and is designed to eliminate biases and reduce the tendency to be judgmental. Participants are asked to submit possible areas of need without discussion, each need is presented without discussion, each need is discussed and clarified, needs are ranked by participants based on the perceived importance of the need. All three of these techniques could be used to help with my research. The Force field Analysis could be used to build the foundation of the research, the Delphi Method to help build consensus and the Nominal group would help to eliminate bias.
(Harris, S., Edmonson, S., and Combs, J. (2010). Examining what we do to improve our schools: 8 steps to improve our schools., pp. 91 – 103, and specifically focus on Strategies for Sustaining Improvement, pp. 94 – 97)

One comment from the blogs that really stuck out in my mind from comments made dealt with my approach to collecting data. Using data collected locally from law enforcement officials in addition to the data collected through AEIS and PIEMS will help determine local trends, such as drug and alcohol use backgrounds in individuals that are high school age. One question was identifying real truancy compared to legitimate absences. Identifying local trends would help provide understanding for trends in the school. Trends in the local community could also help identify occurrences that could possibly be overlooked. Using the two pieces of data together could help identify what is the truth about our truancy rates.