Reflective Educational Research

Supporting Teachers As Researchers (STAR)

The STAR program is an ongoing professional learning experience for K12 teachers in developing their own capacity to conduct action research. Over an extended series of professional learning experiences and facilitated activities, participating schools are provided all of the resources, tools, hands-on training, and support needed for teachers to successfully design, conduct, and apply an action research project in their classroom.

Synchronous and asynchronous online sessions, curated online resources and tools, and virtual office hours support individual teachers (or groups) as they design and use action research to investigate at least one inquiry/research question over the school year. Through activities and curated research experiences, teachers will strengthen their own skills and capacities to use assessment, data, and research to empower their own practices and answer the questions they care most about.

Although methods and topics will vary to reflect teacher interests and needs, likely tools and topics may include:

• Design and use of student drawing activities for documenting learner perception and class ecology
• Design and use surveys for formative and summative reflections on student experience, equity, access, attitudes, perceptions, etc.
• Align assessment practices with lesson objective and broader educational goals
• Use formative and summative data for professional refection
• Empirically measure creativity, social development, emotional development, etc.
• Design and create reflective data from observational rubrics
• Make use of social network analyses to better understand collaboration and student-to-student and student-to-teacher interaction
• Make and apply visual displays of data/data visualizations for exploring trends and insights
• Apply secondary analyses of test scores, grades, and other SIS & LMS data sources
• Develop tools and processes for measuring change over time
• Explore the efficacy, equity, and impacts of teaching and learning practices using broader range of formative and summative assessment techniques

Beginning in 2020, Damian worked with Priscila Torres, Bena Kalick, and Allison Zmuda to develop the STAR program for three Escola Concept school campuses in Brazil. In 2022, the program expands to include a school-wide randomized control study exploring the social and behavioral impacts of media on lower school students, a variety of new data collection and reporting tools, and features Dr. Holly Ludgate, Dr. Alan Amtzis, and Kathleen Ferenz as co-facilitators of 14 new professional learning sessions. Teachers work collaboratively across campuses and with the facilitators to create and carry out their own unique action research investigation over the second half of the school year, resulting in a December 2022 Celebration of Learning.