Future Forwards

to solve real-world problems in Mumbai, and from “flipping” classroom instruction to experimenting with mobile technology in classrooms, interest in this work has spread throughout the school. In fact, several new faculty members cite the existence of an R&D department as a contributing factor to their successful recruitment to ASB. The R&D Team has nearly doubled in size from 11 members in 2011 to 20 members in 2013. Other faculty members have indicated interest in exploring and studying new practices and approaches and applying their learning to transform their own classroom practices and environments. Educators at ASB are looking for ways to “R&D” teaching and learning in their classrooms. It is out of this pattern of development that the R&D department designed and developed an Action Research tool called The Workbook.

At its most basic, action research is a “process” that links and “embeds action and research” (Townsend, 2013, p. 10). In the case of schools, action research enables a community of practitioners to understand, re-design, or create new practices and environments for teaching and learning. Action research doesn’t just create new knowledge at the institutional level, but it creates knowledge and insight for those that engage in the process of action research.

Designing The Workbook

The starting place for designing The Workbook was to create an action research tool that would lower the barriers to research by improving educator access and ease of use. The R&D department wanted to create a one-stop tool where teachers could quickly learn and reference the basic fundamentals of action research and then move seamlessly into planning, conducting, documenting, and sharing their research, all using the same tool. To start, a visual model was created to show the continuous interaction between exploring, prototyping, and transforming and the basic flow of an inquiry based on the ASB Information Fluency Model. The visual model was a call to educators to “be the fire and wish for the wind” in their own professional learning.