A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

Implementing others’ ideas
As teachers, we are members of communities on different 
levels. There’s the school community, where we can 
sometimes get ideas and materials from colleagues, and 
there’s the wider community of teachers in our country
and worldwide. By making the most of opportunities to 
interact in both these communities, you can get ideas for 
your own interventions. A particularly good source might 
be other teachers conducting action research in their own 
classrooms. If they teach in a similar context to yours
(e.g. primary, secondary, etc.), and especially if they are
in the same country as you, ideas that they have may be 
successful in your classroom, too. So, if you’re using this 
book as part of an action research programme, it’s a good 
idea to find out if other participants (either current or past) 
have carried out similar projects, what ideas they had, and 
how successful these were. 
Actions
Findings
A. built a better atmosphere to help relax her learners, 
including allowing them to change seats, having 
interviews with students and parents, getting help from 
the school psychologist and having class discussions.
B. implemented some different classroom activities to 
encourage speaking, including pair and group work, 
using nomination sticks,
1
more formative assessment, 
and asking questions to check understanding.
1
Coloured wooden sticks with students’ names written on them which she would randomly pick out to give each student at least one opportunity
to speak in English�

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71 
| What shall I change?
By attending conferences, and reading journals and 
magazines, you can also find out about what is working in 
the classrooms of other teachers in our own country and 
around the world. But the list doesn’t stop there – you can 
get ideas from almost anywhere, including coursebooks, 
materials and resources that you use, websites for 
teachers, Facebook groups and other online communities. 
However, English teachers work in very different contexts 
worldwide, and something that works in a different 
classroom may not always be useful or appropriate in 
yours, so it’s wise to evaluate such ideas critically and to 
make adaptations if necessary before using them. 
In Chapter Three, we met Andrea, and learnt that she had 
got some initial ideas for her area of research, wrapping up 
lessons, from a website: 
www.busyteacher.com
. It was only 
by trying out a range of different ideas, getting further 
feedback from her learners, and then adapting some of the 
ideas that she eventually developed ideas that worked well 
in her classroom. As such, Andrea’s interventions turned 
out to be successful because they were a combination of 
implementing students’ suggestions, her own ideas, and 
others’ ideas. 
Task 7.5 
Imagine your colleagues had carried out their own 
Exploratory Action Research and had decided that they 
need to implement new actions. As a result of analysing 
and interpreting their findings they now realise that they 
need to