Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

ACTION RESEARCH AND RADICAL CHANGE IN SCHOOLS 107
in the changes that subsequently took place in my thinking has been the
opportunity to read much more widely over the intervening years. Reading
interactively and creatively is, for me, an important part of action research.
In this short section I have the luxury of reflecting back on PALM to
draw out what can be learnt to inform a similar project starting work today.
The key focus of this section is on action research as a means of supporting
change: although IT was centrally important to PALM itself, it is not the
focus here.
The first response of most readers is likely to be that PALM was a lavishly
funded project that provided an unusually high degree of support for
the teachers’ action research. While that is true, there are some factors not
present 15 years ago that would be particularly helpful in mounting such a
project today. The most obvious is that educational policy since the mid-
1990s has re-branded teaching as a research-based, or evidence-based profession.
Teachers are encouraged to engage in research, to present their
work at conferences and to read the research of others and build on it. Even
though PALM took place in East Anglia, which had a fine tradition of
teacher research fostered by the Cambridge Institute of Education and UEA
from the mid-1970s onwards, many teachers saw research as something
esoteric and ‘hard’ and research publications were often characterized as
‘full of jargon’ and ‘irrelevant’ to practice. For this reason, I believe that a
less lavishly funded project could thrive today provided participating teachers
were fully supported by their heads and senior management teams.
Indeed, a good example of a recent action research project in primary
schools, which generated a considerable body of actionable knowledge, is
reported by Torrance and Pryor (2001).
A key factor is how schools come into a project. PALM was not able to
select its schools independently of the three LEAs and this had some unintended,
unfortunate consequences, which are worth rehearsing here as I
have since discovered that they are very common in projects of this kind.
The central issue is the extent to which motivation to participate comes
from teachers themselves or from managers at school or LEA level. Several
of the primary schools found themselves coerced into taking part in the
project because the nearby secondary school had already more or less
agreed to bring them in as part of a cluster, so in this case neither the head
nor the teachers had opted to join voluntarily. In other cases, the main
motivation for schools being ‘volunteered’ by their LEA and head was their
perceived need for IT professional development. Whereas we were explicitly
seeking schools where staff already had reasonable levels of competence
and confidence in using IT, some schools came into PALM because their
staff did not have these qualities.
The support of the LEAs, and their existing culture and relationships
with schools, are crucially important in large-scale action research projects
of this kind. Although the three LEA inspectors’ perceptions of the purposes