What is/are the focus you are considering? How will this help to improve practice?

Activity: Consider the following:

Spend some time considering what aspect (or aspects) of your organisation you are thinking of studying in detail for your major project. Remember that this is ‘only’ 10,000 words. This may sound like a lot but when you break it down – it’s not very much at all (6 sections – Introduction, literature review, Research Design, Findings, Discussion Conclusion). Not even 2000 words for each section!!So – the project needs to be SMALL ENOUGH to manage but SIGNIFICANT ENOUGH to be worth thinking deeply about.

Here are some themes to get you started:

The impact of COVID on…

The use of technology to…

Developing expertise in …(an aspect of leadership and/or management)

Developing…(an aspect of teaching and learning) at …..

How to manage …(a problem that you have noticed).

When you have completed the activity above – share your ideas:

1. Explain – What is/are the focus you are considering? How will this help to improve practice?

2. Consider- what do you think about are the challenges? What evidence do you have?

3. Discuss – What might you ‘do’ to start to understand the problem or work towards addressing it?

Here are some good readings to get you started thinking about research designs (these are all on the reading list):

• • Noffke, S. E., & Somekh, B. (2009). The SAGE handbook of educational action research. SAGE. Links to an external site.
  • Neuman, W. L. (2014). Social research methods: qualitative and quantitative approaches(Seventh edition). Pearson. Links to an external site.
• • Bell, J. (2014). Doing your research project: a guide for first-time researchers(Sixth edition). Open University Press. Links to an external site.
  • Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2018). Research methods in education(Eighth edition). Routledge. Links to an external site.
  • Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research, fourth edition (2018) | BERA. (n.d.). Links to an external site.
  • West-Burnham, J. (2009) Rethinking educational leadership: from improvement to transformation. Network Continuum. Links to an external site.
  • Creswell, J. W., & Guetterman, T. C. (2019). Educational research: planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research(Sixth edition). Pearson.Links to an external site.

The Sage Research Methods resource is a great place to start to find out about all sorts of aspects about educational research.