PLAN
Research Design
- Find a focus
- Design a question
- Plan your creative action
Introduction
This module will help you to find the focus of your research, turning this into a research question and into a creative action – sometimes called an ‘intervention’ – that you will try out in your classroom. At the same time you will plan the logistical overview of your research – when you are going to carry out each stage of it.
These are very integrated aspects of planning your research. We have split them into a series of activities below to help clarify each aspect of this planning, but you will find they are overlapping, and it is likely that you will go back and forth between them, or you might even do them all at the same time.
Activity 1: Designing your research – focus and overview
Use the Research Journal Research Design Template for this activity.
- The Understanding Creativity module helped you to identify an aspect of creative skills or pedagogies that you would like to investigate further. Copy the outcome of this module into the Research Design Template.
- It is very important to make sure you have the right starting point for your action research, so before you continue, check that you have identified a focus that you are passionate about and personally invested in. It should relate to creativity and/or creative pedagogy in your classroom; it should also be related to a teacher or student practice that can and should be improved or developed.
Not sure?
Have a conversation with your dialogue partner or group to refine or adapt your focus until you are confident it meets the criteria above.
- Now work through the rest of the Research Journal Research Design Template. This will help you get a rough overview of the rest of your research. You will need to complete Activities 2 & 3 below to fill in the Research Question and Creative Action sections. Return to the Introduction module for a reminder of the overall timeline that is likely to be needed for each of the other stages you are going to complete, depending on whether you are completing the research in 5, 25, or 40 hours.
- As you work through the other modules you will expand on each of these sections via the activities available there. So, this document is a brief starter template upon which you will expand in each module that you work through.
Activity 2: Developing your research question
Continue to use the Research Journal Research Design Template for this activity.
Designing the right question for you in your action research is important. Dependent on the time and resource you have available, your question should be manageable and answerable. It should not be a question that is answered with a yes/no; action research is much more successful if it focuses on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of practice and learning. And you definitely shouldn’t already know the answer to it!
- Firstly, generate as many statements and questions as you can. You might like to use your Research Diary for this activity. Respond to the following prompts in relation to the creative skills and pedagogies you have identified in your research focus:
I wonder if….
I am noticing that………
I want to find out……..
I have a problem with…..
What if I change …………
I would like to get better at…….
- You may have two or three possible questions at this stage. Use the following list of prompts to help you refine it down to one important question:
Do you have a what, why or how question? If not, how can you change it to become one?
Does your RQ refer to one or more elements of the creative skills or creative pedagogies frameworks? If not, go back to the skills and pedagogies and consider how you could more fully include them.
Are you passionate about it? Hopefully yes! But if not hone your question so that it’s genuinely something that you’d like to find out about in relation to your classroom
Does it relate to teaching and learning in your classroom? You may have a wider Dialogue group focus which is fine, but if not really try to make the questions relevant to your teaching.
Will you be able to collect ethics permissions from everyone involved or their parents if under 18? It’s vital that the answer to this question is yes, so please adapt your question to make it manageable in terms of ethics.
Is it manageable bearing in mind that you need to have results within your particular timeframe? Again, do make sure it’s manageable – now is the time to do this!
- Remember not to finalise your research question too soon though – make sure you sleep on it a little!
- Enter your research question into the Research Design Template.
Activity 3: Planning your Creative Action
Continue to use the Research Journal Research Design Template for this activity.
Alongside refining your question, you will already be thinking about what it is you want to try out in practice in your classroom. If your question is about a creative pedagogy, maybe you will want to plan a lesson or a project in which you put this pedagogy to work. If it is about a creative skill, maybe you will want to plan an activity in which students will be able to utilise or develop the skill you are interested in.
It might be that when you think about your research focus, or your creative partnership, that the first thing that comes to mind is something practical that you would like to try out. You might start from this practical idea, and then turn this into a research question.
Your Creative Action can be something as small as a starter activity for a single lesson; it can be an aspect of practice that you work on developing over a whole term; it can be a bespoke project with an external partner. It can also be something related to creative leadership or curriculum, to assessing creativity, to creative policy, to partnership practice and so on. The important thing is that it is related to you and your practice, and that you try out in practice something that is new to you, slightly different in some way to what you have done before.
Do your Creative Action and Research Question connect to each other? Will your Creative Action help you answer your Research Question? Will your Research Question help you to explore your Creative Action?
Does your Creative Action relate to one or more elements of the creative skills or creative pedagogies frameworks? If not, go back to the skills and pedagogies and consider how you could more fully include them.
Are you passionate about it? Hopefully yes! But if not refine your Creative Action so that it’s genuinely something that you’d like to find out about in relation to your classroom
Does it relate to teaching and learning in your classroom? You may have a wider Dialogue group focus which is fine, but if not, really try to make the Creative Action you explore relevant to your ongoing teaching.
Is it manageable? Will it fit into your ongoing teaching and curriculum commitments; will you be able to resource it; will you be able to deliver it within the timeframe of your research? Again, do make sure it’s manageable – now is the time to do this!
- Enter your plans for your Creative Action into your Research Design Template.
Further reading
McNiff, J. (2016). You and your action research project. Routledge. (Chapter 8: Getting ready: designing and planning your action research project)
FAQs
I thought I had a research design but it changed when I started thinking about data collection
You might write something down in the Research Design Template now that you change once you get to future modules, but you have to start somewhere. We often think that research is a linear process but it is always cyclical and you will find that as you develop ideas in one module, this means you need to change your plans in another module. In the early stages don’t worry if you are doing this. You may also find that you have to alter your research design if, for example, you realise that a particular data collection technique isn’t going to work in the way that you intended. This is fine and part of being a responsive researcher; the key thing here is to document the changes you make and why so that you can be transparent about them in your reporting.
Can I include my students in designing the research?
It is very possible to include students from primary and secondary settings in action research. You can include students to varying degrees. They will obviously be included in your data collection, but you might also decide to include them as deeply as involving them in asking the research question. If you do this it will take much more time to make this process genuine, to give them a voice and to fully incorporate them in your plans. Equally, you may want to include them, for example, just in your data analysis to help you interpret what you have found. It is worth thinking about their involvement early in the process and deciding whether you have the capacity to do this well.
