A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

B: You had a catalogue with titles right?
A: Yes, I had the titles but I didn’t know which ones my 
students would like. 
B: I see. What did you do then?
A: I showed the titles of the readers to my students and
I asked them to choose their favourite. They chose a 
story about animals! I could have never predicted that. 
B: Why? Which one did you think they would choose?
A: A story about UFOs, ghosts or something like that.
Never animals! 
The examples in Task 3.1 above briefly illustrate situations 
where teachers attempt to solve situations or answer a 
question by immediately leaping into action. Unlike those 
situations, in the dialogue above you can see how the 
teacher answered her puzzle by collecting data. In this case 
she explored an unclear situation by asking her students. 
She even reported her surprise when realising that her own 
choice would have been a different one. This only proves 
that, sometimes, taking a decision too quickly and without 
exploring the situation further, can involve incorrect 
assumptions or simply assumptions which may be based on 
signs and intuition (as discussed in Chapter One) instead of 
reasons why this situation is happening, as can be explored 
through the collection of data. 

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What is Exploratory Action Research? | 
21
3.2 Exploratory research: Andrea’s story 
part 1 
Let’s look at an example of how a situation can be explored 
before attempts are made to resolve it. And we will see how 
exploring can be built into everyday practice in Andrea’s 
story, which she tells in her own words:
“I decided to start this research because I had a puzzle 
about my wrapping-up activities. I felt that my closure was 
not efficient or maybe my activities did not engage 
students until the end to ensure their learning and the 
reaching of my class objective: I realised that I tended to 
prepare my classes giving special emphasis to the warm 
up and the main activities and I wondered if the wrapping-
up was as strong as it should be. 
But my first question was: What is a wrapping-up? I had an 
idea about it: a wrapping-up for me was the last activity of 
the class, in which students verbalise, show or present 
what they learned. But maybe it was not. So I started 
surfing the web in order to find some information about it. 
I found a website, 
www.busyteacher.com
. That website 
has many articles written by teachers about different 
topics. Fortunately I found one that concerned the topic I 
was looking for. In that article, the teacher mentions that a 
wrapping-up is the last activity and it must be done by the 
students. In this part of the class the teacher has the role 
of a facilitator.
In that point I felt that what I thought was similar to what 
that article said, so I felt kind of relaxed to be not so “lost”. 
However, something that called my attention was that the 
teacher has a secondary role as a facilitator and that the 
learners are the protagonists and the most important of 
all is that the information must come from the students 
and not from the teacher.
After that action, I decided to also ask some colleagues 
about this topic. I thought that their opinion could be 
useful because I still had questions that I needed to 
answer. I asked them the following: