Description

During your first day of student teaching, the day when you first designed and executed a lesson, you were doing classical action research. First, you determined which academic content area(s) needed to be taught and approached the lesson with a hypothesis on how best to teach particular material to a specified group of students. You then collected data. During the instructional act you watched the students’ faces for clues as to how well the instruction was being received, walked around the desks during the independent practice to see how well the students were progressing, and finally reviewed their tests or quizzes to ascertain what they learned. You concluded your research by evaluating these data and drawing conclusions about how you might teach this material differently should the opportunity occur in the future. (Sagor, 1994)

The above example contains almost all the elements of C.A.R.E., a full action-research study, minus a plan to write up and share the results. What really sets C.A.R.E. apart from the typical action-research study is collaboration. The collaborative action research process is based on a “collaborative”, that is teams of practitioners who share the same work group, be it a professional role, grade level, department, school program, district or geographic region, working jointly on their individual inquiries.