Reflecting on Your Practice

Notes for our seminar

A workshop at the Institute of Guidance Counsellors Annual Conference

Glen Royal Hotel, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, March 2008

Jean McNiff

Action research and guidance counselling

Action research is a form of workplace-based professional learning that enables guidance counsellors and other practitioners to ask questions of the kind, ‘How do I improve what I am doing?’ as they seek to live their values more fully in their practice (Whitehead 1989). The core values in question, within the context of guidance counselling, are the values of compassion, inclusion and independent enquiry that come to the fore in a critical awareness of the vulnerability of self and others while encouraging independence in learning and action. Guidance counsellors would ask, ‘How do I encourage students to take responsibility for their own decisions? How do enable them to make wise choices? How do I learn to be a better guidance counsellor?’

Key features of action research

Some of the key features of action research are:

The study is workplace-based, across professions and disciplines

• The living ‘I’ is the centre of the enquiry
• Research questions can take the form, ‘How do I improve my practice?’
• The work is done collaboratively and through negotiation
• It is underpinned by the core values of democracy, inclusion, compassion, accountability, and self-determination and self-development
• Accounts are made available for public scrutiny in the form of practitioners’ own living theories of practice, comprising their descriptions and explanations for what they are doing
• The work emphasises the idea of educational influences in learning
• The work links themes of creating knowledge and improvement of practice

Significance and potentials of action research

Action research is now used extensively, in international settings, to address key policy agendas relating to workplace-based professional education. Some of these areas are

• Personalised learning
• Systems redesign
• Deep learnings for organisational development
• Professional portfolios
• Personal and organisational wellbeing
• Environmental sustainability
• Cultural renewal and renaissance

An action research planner

Action enquiries often take the form of people asking critical questions, such as these:

• What is my concern?
• Why am I concerned?
• What experiences can I describe to show why I am concerned?
• What can I do about it?
• What will I do about it?
• What kind of data will I gather to show the situation as it unfolds?
• How do I ensure that any conclusions I come to are reasonably fair and accurate?
• How do I explain the significance of my research?
• How do I modify my concerns, ideas and practices in the light of my evaluation?

Resources

Action research resources may be found at www.actionresearch.net and www.jeanmcniff.co

Key texts include:

McNiff, J. (2003) Action Research for Professional Development. This booklet may be downloaded from http://www.jeanmcniff.com/booklet1.html, for use in your own context.

McNiff, J. and Whitehead, J. (2006) All You Need to Know about Action Research. London, Sage.

McNiff, J., Lomax, P. and Whitehead, J. (2003) Your and Your Action Research Project (second edition). London, Routledge.

Whitehead, J. (1989) Creating a Living Educational Theory from Questions of the Kind, ‘How do I improve my Practice?’, Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 137–153. Retrieved 8 th March 2008 from http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/livtheory.html

Whitehead, J. and McNiff, J. (2006) Action Research: Living Theory. London, Sage.

Please contact me at jeanmcniff@mac.com

Thank you!

Jean McNiff