My life as a teacher changed when I came in touch with the term Action Research while teaching at the IB. This happened when we had a workshop with an American lady. I realized that all along I was an amateur action researcher in the classroom, without knowing so. That is, I was always studying the learning process happening in my classroom in order to improve upon it (Hine, 2013). Once I understood the process of action research, I became a conscious researcher and it changed my whole perspective to teaching.
Instead of a participant, I became an observer and a learner. This empowered me as a person and gave me the courage to face each day as a new day. I started action research to improve the lives of the children but then found it improved my own life also (Hine, 2013). Being a teacher, pedagogical research has value for me only if it is applied in the class. What is it that works for learning? That is the question driving my work. Mine is a practical and action based research (Painter, 1999).
With this clarity in mind, I explored several trends in education, but with an eye to apply them in the classroom and not to gather data on them. I explored Multiple Intelligence, Flip the class using internet (TeAchnology, 2012), Collaboration and Project Method of teaching. The most rewarding was when I opened the space for students also by including them in the flow of decision making in the classroom. They were collaborators and not students (TeAchnology, 2012). By and by, slowly I developed my own ethos of teaching that led to me being able to teach a diverse group of students by keeping inclusivity in the mind. I had found my own way of teaching that was the way of ever present growth of me as a teacher. For when you focus on including diversity in the class as the chief focus, you keep growing and learning about new ideas in education.
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