Improving Participation of the Staff Meeting in a University Essay

Improving Participation of the Staff Meeting in a University - Essay Example As I noted in my earlier Action Research Project Plan, which basically became the manual for this research, Hill defines management as â€Å"getting things done through and with other people† (Hill, ibid.). As the time has elapsed between writing that plan and concluding this research, I have become even more convinced that co-operation (the â€Å"through and with other people† of Hill’s notion) is an essential behaviour if the work of our group is to prosper.It will be recalled from that project plan that I have chosen to pursue this work through the qualitative paradigm of Action Research as a practitioner- researcher. I hoped during the research to improving my own skills in facilitating meetings and to improve practice through the implementation of change in the way meetings are run in my workplace. To be a successful practitioner- researcher, I understood that I must achieve what Ritchie and Spencer (1994: 173) have called â€Å"actionable outcomes† i n order to bring about the organisational change that I seek but that I must also maintain the academic rigour of the work. I found guidance for my approach to keeping this balance in the research in the work in Argyris' (1999: 432) who has made the social scientist's dilemma of choosing between rigour and relevance central to the way in which he has adapted Lewin's Action Research heritage. He concludes that: From the action researcher's perspective, the challenge is to define and meet standards of appropriate rigor without sacrificing relevance. (Italics in the original) Thus in mid November 2005 I began, with some confidence, to apply the wide range of data gathering techniques (including, collection of documentary evidence, observation, questionnaire, group discussion and analysis of my own reflective research journal) that I had planned earlier. I expected to do this within a highly practitioner centred approach that ensured academic appropriateness, rigour and relevance within the research as a whole. 2. An account of the situation and action to improve it I began the research by applying the data gathering methods that had been foreseen in the Action Research Project Plan. In this section I will report on the usage of these methods and demonstrate how they helped in the data collection process. Whilst each of these tools was used throughout the work, the emphasis and importance of each changed as the programme evolved and moved through the various cycles of the research from Reconnaissance to Review and Reflection. The programme of Reconnaissance data collection took place between the 1st November 2005 and Christmas of the same year with the data being analysed during the Christmas/New Year break. 2.1 Reflective research diary Firstly, I began to write my reflective research journal. This was quite a difficult task to maintain because although the early enthusiasm ensured that I sat down regularly at my computer I found that it was difficult to make the writing "reflective". I began to ask myself "what is it that makes this document a reflective journal and not just a diary" As a result of this difficulty I adopted an approach whereby I first wrote down a record of events and made notes of things that people had said or done during the period that I was recording. This was the diary phase of journal writing and was quite easy. I then got into the habit of going over the work and using the automatic highlighter, would colour code things that struck me as relevant to the ongoing research. It was through this routine that I developed my reflective skills and, for example, identified for myself the fact that one of my co-researchers had tendency to support