On March 2nd, 2013 the Faculty of Education at Vancouver Island University hosted its second annual Master’s of Educational Leadership Action Research Conference. Each year VIU’s Master’s in Educational Leadership students present the results of their action research thesis projects to an audience of graduate students who are starting their Master’s program and other members of the education community. Past theses from graduates of our graduate programs are available here.

To keynote this year’s conference, we invited a talented team of teachers and administrators from across the province who are working with the Ministry of Education on an action research partnership called the Quality Teaching and Learning Initiative. The initiative includes teams of four educators from six school districts from all corners of the province. Each district is pursuing a wide variety of action research projects, but over the last year the teams have met regularly to learn together through reading the most recent research around 21st century learning and educational change and to pursue some common questions. The questions that guided their discussions were:

1. What does quality learning look like?

2. What does quality teaching look like?

3. How are we supporting teaching/learning practices?

4. What is emerging?

5. What is enduring?

Their conceptual framework is represented in the diagram below:

The team’s presentation was amazing and I think their model of action research is particularly effective. It’s a distributed approach where teams of educators who are doing different things were supported by the Ministry of Education to come together to learn from each other through conversations based in research and their experiences.

One of the team’s main conclusions was that the answers to questions 1, 2, and 3 all centered around common themes. Teaching, learning, and support could be described as engaging and motivating, collaborative, connected, authentic, broad, open-ended and personalized. The enduring and emerging practices were dynamic and interconnected.  Enduring practices included assessment (for, as, of), relationships, the basics and differentiated instruction. Emerging practices included the need to define new basics, coaching/collaboration, technology, inquiry, choice and were student centric. Here is a link to their presentation [A transformation agenda – QTL Initiative Presentation VIU March 2 – web version 2]. Please check it out to see which school districts are involved and for examples of the 21st century practices that are being implemented. We were honoured to have this amazing team come to present at VIU and hope our new relationships can endure.