Going global with action research

Congratulations to Kate Giles (teacher in Pymble’s Junior School) who has been selected as a GARC Fellow 2023/24. The Global Action Research Collaborative Fellowship (GARC) is an initiative of the  International Coalition of Girls’ Schools and Kate is Pymble‘s second Fellow.

Kate’s action research project, under the theme: Engaging the power of many voices: leveraging girls’ collaborative spirit towards courageous and joyful learning, will explore how to create environments both at school and at home for students to be able to collaborate and work in partnership with their families and educators. This prestigious 18-month research project represents an investment in our staff and in the wider girls’ schools commitment to lifting girls’ educational experiences.

Kate writes:

In my research for the GARC fellowship, I have been learning about action research and how I can improve my own practice and influence the practice of the teachers I work with, particularly around collaboration and partnership with parents. I am passionate about authentic three-way collaboration between parents, students and teachers and interested to investigate how to best do this in the context of Pymble.

Kate’s work is based in the following areas of literature which reflect her starting point. But, as action researchers will know, projects develop through time and so we look forward to further updates along the way.

Insights into literature:

Griffiths, A.-J., Alsip, J., Hart, S. R., Round, R. L., & Brady, J. (2021). Together We Can Do So Much: A Systematic Review and Conceptual Framework of Collaboration in Schools. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 36(1), 59–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/0829573520915368

This article defines and explores collaboration, particularly collaboration between schools and parents, as an important part of ensuring equal educational opportunities for all students. It discusses the benefits of collaboration, including more effective communication, more sustainable relationships and goals being reached. The authors also conducted a review of research literature, which they stated was necessary given ‘collaboration between schools and families can lead to positive learning outcomes for students’ (p.60), referencing authors such as Joyce Epstein (2001), a pre-eminent researcher in this area. Of note, the article goes on to explore how this collaboration is not a simple process and can be challenging in the complex setting that is a school with the most difficult being the definition of collaboration. This is important in a school context and it will be essential to my research to first ensure that there is agreement between parents and the school about how collaboration is defined and what it does and does not include.

When thinking about my research, I realise how the eight constructs identified in this article as leading to collaboration (open communication, trust, mutual respect, shared goals, common understanding, shared responsibility, active participation and shared decision making) will need to be explicitly defined when analysing any three-way collaboration between teacher, students and their parents. However, the authors actually encourage caution when interpreting their own review given the inconsistencies of terminology used across the research articles they reviewed. The authors created a collaboration checklist (figure 3) to aid school teams which may be useful when exploring how best to facilitate collaboration between various stakeholders. This may be something I could seek to use to create my own checklist when investigating teacher-student-parent-collaboration further.

A final question that the article raised for me was around the measurement of collaboration (and its impact) and how this is most effectively done. This is something that will need further exploration and review in my research.

Solone, C.J., Thornton, B.E., Chiappe, J.C., Perez, C., Rearick, M.K., & Falvey, M.A. (2020). Creating Collaborative Schools in the United States: A Review of Best Practices. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 12, 283-292.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1242461.pdf

Similar to the above article, the authors of this article also seek to define and explore how collaboration is essential for the creation of inclusive and effective schools where teachers and parents work together to achieve common goals or a shared vision for students with disabilities. Interestingly, when defining collaboration, the authors indicated that it does not mean avoiding confrontation, but instead provides a vehicle for discussion of differences and difficult concepts and building upon these different perspectives. This resonated with me as often in schools, parent- teacher-student partnerships have tried to reach consensus and essentially avoid any disagreement, where here, the authors were indicating that collaboration meant it was necessary to face and address any disagreements and difficulties together.

In this article, the characteristics of collaboration were also defined, where at a minimum it is people working together to reach a common goal- in the case of education to support and educate students. The authors define similar characteristics as the above article (parity, mutual goals, shared responsibility) but also included shared resources, where sharing time, knowledge and materials enhance collaboration; and synergy, where the group working together is more impactful than any of the individuals alone. The article discusses different collaboration within an educational setting, including collaboration between students (both with and without disabilities) and collaboration between schools and parents and carers.

I was particularly interested in reading about parent and teacher collaboration which is the intended focus of my research. Here the authors discuss the best practice for family-educator collaboration, specifically communication, equity, trust and respect (p.287). I was interested to see the importance of equity, where all voices and opinions are valued, as in my experience this is not always the case.

From the Director of the Pymble Institute

Collaboration is key to building a research culture in a school. Stepping back from my own research and teaching areas, and looking across the broad landscape of Pymble Ladies’ College, it is inspiring to see how our research culture is developing.

This is boosted greatly by invitations to participate in transformative research which come our way and by partners and critical friends in the academic community who make contact to discuss plans before they are signed and sealed. Curious minds assist in opening discussion about what research will benefit a class, team or the entire College and widening the funnel to involve more people in the process brings greater diversity to the project itself.

What does this look like in action? Two examples are shared in this edition; one is an action research project being undertaken by Junior School teacher, Kate Giles, who is a Fellow of the Global Action Research Collaboration which is led by the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools. Read Kate’s article to see how her thinking is developing as she works towards setting her research question. The slow(ish) journey towards this important step is reinforcing how important it is that the researcher understands how the issue she wishes to research is understood by others in the community.  A second example is seen in the Pymble-UTS Data Science pilot project. The project is now in the analysis phase and is incorporating data in an iterative manner. The pace of this project is dynamic and exciting as it brings so many people together! The analysis is now in an important phase as it moves from students to staff, then loops back again to re-test and explore understandings, again, with the students and staff.

Throughout my PhD journey, which saw me explore the topic of how middle school girls use curriculum to plan their futures, a small post-it note sat on the wall: The quieter you become, the more you hear. This remains a motto in my everyday work as I assist others to research their projects and as I set the course for the College’s research priorities. In our collaborations, listening allows learning to flow. This is a key outcome of research in schools.

Pymble Perspectives

The 3rd edition of the Pymble student research journal, Perspective, was launched with a celebration of student voice. The edition contains over 30 items of student inquiry including historical research, scientific papers, transcripts of speeches, science posters and creative explorations. Guest speaker, Gracie Abadee (ex-student and journalist), highlighted the importance of combining interests in research and communications, and the diversity of voices in the media. She encouraged students to maximise their curiosity and ways of developing their perspectives.

This edition was edited, compiled and designed by a team of students who threw themselves into the editorial process, learning from the ground up. The sub-categories of English, Science, History and Politics/Philosophy/Economics were formed to cater for the articles submitted with younger students looking over and editing the work of older girls. This was a new experience and highlighted issues of the power editors of journals hold. One of the Editors reflected:

“A highlight of my experience with the PI was when I was involved with editing the Perspective journal. It was so inspiring to see the high quality of work that my peers were producing and I was able to get an understanding of what it would be like to be an editor”.

The digital edition of Perspective is available on the Pymble Institute website. Please enjoy some photos of the launch below.

Research skill building with Sokratis

Sokratis is a student-led research project that allows students to pursue a line of inquiry of their own interest, with a teacher or Year 12 student as a mentor. The program has recently been re-launched and is open to all students in Years 7 to 11. These students have identified a topic and are now developing their own research question. Groups of Year 3 to Year 6 students are also participating using the topic, What matters to me.

Conde Library was abuzz with excitement at the opening of the program, the Meet and Mix event, as students across Years 7 to 11 dropped in to chat to other students and teachers about their research ideas.

110 Secondary students have submitted research questions and 50 staff have signed up a mentors. Years 7 to 11 students have generated an incredible breadth and depth of questions, including:

“How do black holes interact with the causal structure of spacetime?”

“What are the negative psychological impacts of single-sex education after high school?”

“To what extent does multilingualism affect cognitive abilities and on a wider scale, influence our personality and experiences in society?”

Celebrating learning with Data Science

What is better than starting a research project? Being together for discussion when the results are in!

There was an energetic buzz in the room when the Pymble Data Science teaching team and academics from UTS Education and International Studies and UTS Data Science Institute, held a focus group to discuss emerging results of the facial recognition project. The pilot project investigated how we can use Artificial Intelligence to better understand student engagement in online tasks. Technology developed by Dr Yu, Dr Dong and colleagues from the UTS Data Science Institute can track where students look on the screen, for how long, where they move the cursor, how intensely they focus, and facial expressions including eye and head movement which suggest concentration and distraction. The data collected was not in video, nor photo form but was transferred into code. The code helped the researchers understand student engagement and was amplified when matched with qualitative feedback from student focus groups. The coded data was aligned with focus group data from a sub-group of participating students.

The buzz in the room arose as the teachers responded to the academics’ work which highlighted three ‘personas’ of Data Science students. One of the academics commented: “I have rarely been part of a group that was so energised and filled with such infectious enthusiasm for research findings!”

The teachers resonated with the student engagement profiles of the Whizz, the Worrier and the Worker. Teachers and researchers could see how students clustered into these categories at different times during the task and how elements from all three are essential in educating future data scientists.

The next steps are for Pymble’s Data Science students to go ‘behind the scenes’ with the UTS team as they learn more about the technology and how research is utilised. 

And as great research results, it produced more questions and tangents of inquiry we may wish to pursue!

How do schools engage with research?

The Research-Invested Schools network (RIS) began in 2021 and brings together research leads in schools around Australia to encourage the sharing of practice and collaborative projects. The Pymble Institute is pleased to be a member of the Network as we learn from the work of new and established research programs and research cultures in schools all over the country.

An important audit of how schools engage with research is being conducted by Dr Carl Leonard and colleagues from the School of Education, University of Newcastle. The project has developed in partnership with The Scots College Research Office, under the guidance of Dr Hugh Chilton and Dr Caitlin Munday. Dr Leonard recently presented findings to the RIS Network which help school research leads place our own schools’ work in context. 

We learned that not many schools have ethics committees but at Pymble our committee is constantly growing both in numbers (of students and staff) and in the skills members bring to decision making about research. Recent meetings have included appraisal of Year 12 Extension Science projects which involve human participants. Outcomes focused on recruiting participants and sharing project outcomes as these have potential to be valuable beyond the Extension Science project itself. We have also invited the research team from the University of Technology’s Data Science Institute and School of Education to join us while we discussed their application. Students were able to question the academics and the research team gained valuable insights into the school’s culture.

Our Ethics Committee runs differently from university committees as the focus is on learning how to make ethical decisions and making these collaboratively. We believe the feedback to researchers could be more helpful. Pymble Institute Director, Dr Sarah Loch, will present to the RIS Network on Pymble’s approach to ethics in research at the Term 3 meeting.