Dear Pip and Marie,
thank you for these brilliant and timely resources. They are both amazingly serendipitous!

Pip, I have been tearing my hair out trying to find an appropriate data gathering model to demonstrate the efficacy of the Formal English acquisition strategy I use in my classes; I've been given release time and money to implement it across a number of classes this Fall and then define the improvement curve. The inadequacy of any models I've found so far had been engendering a feeling of panic...:) Thank you, thank you. 

Marie, this publication, Action Research for the Professional Development of Teachers, is going to electrify my Dean and most - if not all - of our course co-ordinators. They are constantly working to implement strategies and practices that reflect both best practice and the development of for *real* learning outcomes (as opposed to merely the required - but meaningless - test scores). I don't think I have ever seen anything that provides so exciting, clear, condensed and *useful* an exposition of, rationale for and guide to conducting AR. And the reason this will be electrifying is that it just so happens that one of those course co-ordinators is getting ready to make the case for AR and systematic reflective practice within the department... as I write. Thank you so much, and please pass on my deep gratitude and appreciation to Renata and her colleagues?

love
Sara

"I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather... I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal."
Haim Ginott
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From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Marie Huxtable [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2011 7:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: A possibly useful resource

Hi Pip
Many thanks for this. I have added a link from my site and will pass the details on. I was really excited to receive a note from Renata Ozorlić Dominić who is Senior Adviser, with the Croatian Education & Teacher Training Agency. She and her colleagues have done an amazing job bringing together papers from the conference in Zagreb last year, with papers translated in Croatian and English. Renata has just written to say an  e-version of the publication Action Research for the Professional Development of Teachers can be downloaded from www.karaman-design.com/download/Akcijsko_istrazivanje_web.pdf<http://www.karaman-design.com/download/Akcijsko_istrazivanje_web.pdf> Hope you might enjoy and find the resource useful as well.

Spread the smile
Marie


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From: Pip and Bruce <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thu, 19 May, 2011 5:32:39
Subject: A possibly useful resource

Hi all

 Sorry to break in on the flow of what looks like a fascinating conversation (have been travelling in the UK/Europe, sorry to have missed some 'old' AR friends including Jean at York St John, Jack and the Bath group as I visited near Bath, but was able to celebrate the publication of her books on Chinese educational experiences with Moira Laidlaw, so that was good!)

Am now back at work in New Zealand, and I've just received a new publication from our teaching excellence centre, Ako Aotearoa. Their "A Tertiary Practitioner's guide to collecting evidence of learner benefit" is freely available from http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/collecting-evidence so I thought I'd pass it on in case any of you are working in environments where it might be useful. Ako has a huge variety of resources available from the website and they're copyright free with the following proviso: "You are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work as well as to remix, tweak and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as you credit the author/s and license your new creations under the identical terms". Here's to free sharing! Hope you enjoy it.

Warm regards

 Pip Bruce Ferguson