Action Research: An Educational Leader’s Guide to School Improvement, Third Edition

is a clear and practical guide to conducting action research in schools. Although it offers neither a cookbook nor a quick-fix approach, this book does outline the process of designing and reporting an action research project. Useful as a classroom text as well as a self-teaching tool, Action Research: An Educational Leader’s Guide to School Improvement is a comprehensive training manual. It can be used by practitioners in the field, by graduate students enrolled in leadership and/or master’s thesis courses, or by anyone interested in learning how to conduct action research projects, including classroom teachers, who are leaders too in their own right. The strategies and techniques of action research described are no different for teachers than they are for administrators.

The underlying assumption of this work is that research is not a domain only for academics, it is also a powerful approach that can be used by practitioners to contribute to school renewal and instructional improvement. Rather than being merely a philosophical treatise or theoretical analysis, Action Research provides concrete strategies and techniques for conducting action research in schools.