Research: Questions, Reflection, and Profession

This week gave us the opportunity to see a lot of examples of action research topics, and spend a lot of time reflecting on what we want to do for our own research.  

This set of assignments came at a very appropriate time for me.  I spent Wednesday through Friday at a conference hosted by the Texas Association for Gifted and Talented (TAGT) in downtown Dallas. 

There were a wide range of excellent presenters, giving presentations on everything from Curriculum and Instruction to Program Design and Implementation, to the Social and Emotional needs of learners. 

The sessions I sat in on gave me a lot of great tools to take back to teachers, but also presented a lot of research that had been done by educators to determine best practices for gifted students.  They also reminded me some of the reasons I got into education, and I had an opportunity to speak with a lot of administrators about their experience in their education careers.

Through the course of the reading, and the course of the conference, I found some goals and some areas of interest for myself.  I know that one thing I want to continue to work on is helping my district improve cooperation between the Social Studies and ELA departments in order to increase student performance.  

I also spent a lot of time thinking about how data was presented and how research was done, and whether or not those processes had produced valid, applicable, verifiable, repeatable data.  All of those are important factors to consider about the research design for my Action Research Project.

Overall it was a really good week for me professionally, and in addition to the readings I had a lot of great experiences.  

P.S. If anyone’s looking for some great resources for using technology in instruction, I highly recommend http://www.brianhousand.com