Draft Action Research Report

Week 3 Assignment, Part 3

Draft Action Research Project Progress Report

In What Ways Can Band Parent Participation Be Improved

            The band directors need parent participation and expressed frustration at so few parents showing up to Band Booster meetings or assisting at any activities or events the bands held. Through interviews with the band directors and the Band Booster executive committee, it was determined that no one had ever asked the non-participating parents why they were not helping.

           

That is as far as my action research has gone. I had to throw out my original plan and start over. I have designed a parent survey and have 121 of them returned. I will be presenting my findings of that survey in the coming week and determining what action(s) will be done. I have a plan, but it is a work in progress and still being revised. I have no answers for the following areas at this time.

Objectives and Vision of the action research project. (ELCC 1.1)

Review of the Literature and Action Research Strategy –Articulate the Vision (ELCC 1.2)

Manage the organization (ELCC 3.1

Manage Operations (ELCC 3.2Respond to Community Interest and Needs (ELCC 4.2)

New update

I have volunteered to be an admin intern for our JH summer school. I am LOVING it! The summer school principal is one of the AP's at the school and he's had a couple of interns before and he went through this same type of program, so he's very familiar with the 18 month program.

I met with the "team" last Saturday and the principal informed me that he would be out on Tuesday, a staff development day, due to jury duty. He asked me if I could do the staff development for him! Which included a PowerPoint presentation! I hope I didn't look as "uh-oh!" as I felt, but I said "sure". He gave me the materials on Monday afternoon. I wish I had the book he was using as a reference when I was doing my AR project on school climate. I spent hours doing the student survey and they had almost the same thing in the back of the book! ARG!!! Oh well, it's a dead issue anyways.

Long story short. I felt pretty comfortable in front of the staff of 20 teachers. I kind of winged the PowerPoint as I wasn't going to just read the slides to them and the comment from the AP that was asked to help me if I needed it was "You did great! Just like you had read the book!" and said I just needed to speak louder. By that night, I was being introduced by the teachers to the students as "Asst. Principal".

So far my duties have included, getting students their schedules - which includes getting about half of them straightened out with the councilor, breakfast duty, lunch duty, and bus/car rider duty. I've been the go to person anytime the principal has had to step out (or been out doing interviews with the rest of the admin staff). And I've also had to deal with a student that just didn't want to cooperate with the teacher, observed the principal handle a couple of irate parents and cafeteria workers. I'm learning so much. I know I haven't experienced the whole job of AP yet, but I am confident I can do the job.

AR Update .. Or is it downdate?

Wow! I've taken a whole class and didn't blog! The class was school law and was very interesting. It was a very busy 5 weeks with work, school, and family all clamoring for attention.

I made it through with only one major issue. My action research has come to a complete halt. Earlier I posted about my issues with the kick-off and it just went down-hill from there. I am changing campuses next year and my new principal (and site-supervisor) is not interested in my student based AR, and I am okay with that.

So, what to do? I was sitting in a beginning band event with the director that had organized the event listening to her wonder why parent attendance was so low and it hit me ... how about an AR on why the band parents were not showing up to this event or the previous one! We did not know the reason ... was it a language barrier? One meeting had Spanish and English notices. Was it a time/date barrier? Was the notice of the events sent out in time? How was it sent home? Did it even get home? How can I find out? What can I do about whatever I find out?

Advantage? It was a smaller group to work with than the whole school. It was something the department wanted to improve but just didn't seem to know how.

Now, I have to very quickly re-do my plan and get it approved. Good thing the next class doesn't start for another week.

Anyone have any suggestions for me? Please don't be shy. I need help.

Much better!

Web Conf Reflections

Tonight's web conf was MUCH better. I was only booted once and I had to jump off to get my headset working once. Today a couple more people shared their community involvement ideas. I don't remember all the names .. I do remember TURN, but not what it stands for. All of the projects sound great. In fact, they make mine seem so under thought out that I would not share. I think mine has great potential, but it won't get to actually see light. At least not this year. However, since my idea was expanding the college week to include the world of work and making a fair to show students (and parents) skills (ex. interviewing skills, resume building, etc.), perhaps doing this at the high school would work too (that's the campus I am moving to next year). The high school does have a college night where they invite colleges to the school and that's more than what we do at the 6th grade campus. I still feel this is a bit late as I originally wanted to motivate the 6th grade students to do better so they plan sooner.

I liked this class a lot. It opened my eyes to many issues that I had not thought about. One major one that comes to mind is the week one reading of the research on Hispanic parent involvement. I actually shared this with some fellow band directors to get them to think that perhaps it wasn't apathy that was keeping their Hispanic parents away, but culture. After this class, I'm wishing I had picked the parent involvement idea I had for my action research. But, I'm not ready to throw in the towel on my original plan just yet. I am going to make a huge effort to push for more parent involvement from now on though. I'm sure I will be blogging again for my next class - school law. So, until next week ... Take Care!

Am I the only one?

Web conference tonight was more connection issue than anything else. Am I the only one having issues staying connected once I'm in there? I think it reset itself about 10 times and twice I had to refresh the page. About all I heard/read was some ideas for community involvement that others are doing. I heard of the school within a school one with ninth graders and getting them to be more independent. I also heard some about dual language schools/classes. I think that's cool considering I spent almost 3 years in Japan (DOD schools) and know what a whole society doing multi-language schools can do. I will have to read the log to see what else I missed.

Next time I will have both computers loaded and ready so if one crashes I can try the other. Just to see if it's my computer or ISP since they have different ISP's. Well, off to do more homework .. and nine week grades .. cook dinner .. bathe the 3 yr old .. and ... well, I'm sure there's some other stuff I'm supposed to get done tonight as well! LOL Take care everyone!

Eh? What was that??

Tonight's web conference had a lot of technical issues. Between it randomly dropping connection and rebooting itself (nice that it did that actually), and the audio being out more than on, I didn't get a lot out of tonight's session.

There was more chat about the ILD, which I learned about last webconf. I had already emailed Dr. J about taking the class in June at Lamar. I also followed a posted link to the course calendar with dates. It's kind of daunting to think that by the end of this calendar year, I will have taken 6 more courses. I'm trying not to really think about that and how much time my new position at work is going to be in the Fall. Somehow, I will prevail. I don't want to scare myself by thinking about it, or I might panic ... and Dr. J doesn't want us to panic, so I just won't think about it! :-D

Web Conf Reflections

Seems I didn't do one last time. OOPS! I misunderstood the directions, or probably just didn't pay attention close enough. The last couple of web conferences were a little messed up with different links being posted and I joined the actual site late. I spent the first five minutes just reading the chat so I could catch up. It has gotten better as the correct links were posted today.

Since my last class introduced me to the whole concept of "web conference", I feel more comfortable in joining them now. I actually like them since we're not in a traditional setting where we can all see each other at every class. I also like the fact that I can get my questions answered in real time.

In tonight's web conference, Dr. Jenkins discussed when the midterm study guide would be posted and that he's instructed IA's to open the midterm early for those that need to take it early. Since I'm behind on this week's assignment due to my AR kicking off (see below), I asked for an extension so I'll be one of those taking the midterm on-time or last. Spring Break for me will be catching up and getting ahead again. I need to be ahead because my band has UIL contest on April 2, our last day of class. As Dr. Jenkins mentioned, "distress" tends to turn to disease and I've had enough of that! {I had my gallbladder removed in January} So, back to my homework!