EDLD 5301 Week 2 Reflection

I was very surprised by the interview with Dr. Timothy Chargois as a model of action research.  His comments and findings seem counter to the design model of action research in that they rely on district and education reform foundations to dictate what happens at the campus level.  He spoke of using data to drive decisions, but then looking outside the campus to things such as the Dell foundation to provide solutions.  These foundations, so called based in education reform, or more about the privatization of education and the adoption of the corporate model.  I feel such foundations do far more harm than good and deceptively misinform, deliberately, the public as a whole as to the needs and realities of public education.

In the second interview, Dr. Timothy Chargois, the Director of Research from Planning and Development in Beaumont ISD, discussed his work in action research in the topic of instructional strategies.  Right away Dr. Chargois spoke to the idea of data drive decision making and the use of data in instructional decisions.  These programs and paradigms are being brought in from the outside and Dr. Chargois spoke about them coming from district level or from educational research foundations.  In the traditional model of data driven decision making, the data is often not timely and it requires the whole faculty and significant time and resources to make sense of it.  Dr. Chargois spoke of using data to “make decisions today” so that the analysis of the data and its implication for pedagogy and content are very close in time.  To accomplish this, Dr. Chargois spoke of new software that helps teachers make sense of data more quickly and to enable them to use software to generate, gather and analyze their own data.  This puts teachers in almost an action research paradigm and cannot help but encourage reflection upon their instruction and instructional content. 

Dr. Chargois is modeling this by having people come in and administer a Survey Monkey instrument to teachers that discusses their ethical responsibilities to instruction.  By showing teachers the model in action, teachers can see the benefits of action research and how they may themselves use it in their classroom.

Dr. Chargois spoke of taking all of the data streams and using it to systemically effect change by looking at all of the background material on teachers and their instruction to come up with a quantitative number.  This is being done in partnership with the Dell Foundation.

I disagree with most of Dr. Chargois’ approach.  Top level administration and outside so called educational reform foundations are far removed from the individual campus and even further from the classroom.  Technology and programs never replace good teaching and his attempt to integrate such programs into campuses is quite the opposite of the principal level intent of action research.