Ways to Improve Teacher Inquiry Quality

Part One: This week, you learned that evaluating and validating the quality of your action research is part of the recursive process. Fortunately, there are quality indicators that can help assess your own inquiry and the inquiries of others. Reflect on “A Case Study: Living the Process of Inquiry With a Real Teacher-Researcher” and consider how these indicators outlined in the course text can improve the quality of May’s teacher inquiry project.

The five indicators from your course text have been grouped below. Choose one of the quality indicators listed, based on which area of May’s inquiry you think needs the most improvement. Use the questions posed within the quality indicator(s) to guide your response. You will have an opportunity to find out if your peers agree with your analysis.

Quality Indicators for Assessing Teacher Research

Indicator #1 Context of Study

Indicator #2 Wonderings and Purpose

Indicator #3 Teacher Research Design (data collection and analysis)

Indicator #4 Teacher-Researcher Learning

Indicator #5 Implications for Practice

Part Two: As you have learned throughout this course, teacher inquiry is a recursive process. Teacher-inquirers continuously evaluate and validate their findings in order to improve their action research plans. Search for one visual representation of the recursive process for action research on the Internet. Provide the hyperlink and a one-sentence summary describing the visual illustration you selected to depict the “ recursive” process. It might be helpful to Google the following: plan, do, study, act. Use other key words to narrow your search such as action research, recursive process, or PDSA.