A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

2. Act [implement the change]
You apply the change (‘intervention’) you have planned.
3. Observe [see what happens – with data]
You collect data either while the intervention is taking 
place or after it, and you analyse it.
1. Plan (to change)
2. Act [implement the change]
3. Observe [see what happens – with data]
4. Reflect [interpret what occurred]
A. Plan
to explore
B. Explore
C. Analyse 
and reflect
1. Plan
(to change)
2. Act
3. Observe
4. Reflect
?
exploration
action

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26 
| What is Exploratory Action Research?
Task 3.5
As emphasised above, we believe that sufficient exploration 
is very important before you engage in action research. 
Why? Note down one or two of your own reasons before 
reading on. Hint: don’t forget the stories you’ve already 
read, for example in Tasks 3.1 and 3.4!
There are at least three good reasons for exploring a 
situation before planning action to change it:
1) Before we can decide what to do, we need to understand 
the current situation. As teachers, we often think we 
understand what is happening in our classrooms, but this
is not always the case. The problem-solving examples in 
Task 3.1 (and associated commentary) show that, without 
exploration, we can easily take the wrong action and even 
make things worse.
2) In order to decide whether our action has been 
successful, we need to compare what happens with the 
situation as it was before we acted. By exploring the 
situation and collecting data, we will have enough 
information about the initial situation to do this. Another, 
related, advantage is that we can often use the same way 
of collecting data after a new action, making it relatively 
easy to compare the situations.
3) It may not be very difficult to combine exploration in 
your classroom with your everyday teaching. It shouldn’t 
increase your workload too much and should go well 
together with what you normally do. Exploration essentially 
means looking at your situation in a different way, or in 
more detail, and this, as we’ve seen, can be advantageous 
for a number of reasons. 
As we saw in Chapter Two, and in Andrea’s story in this 
chapter, research begins with and grows out of questions.
we ask ourselves. So it may be useful at this point to 
highlight the way Exploratory Action Research has two 
separate basic research questions, which relate to the two 
separate phases shown in the ‘Steps of Exploratory Action 
Research’ diagram – Exploration and Action:
Only these two main questions are necessary for 
Exploratory Action Research. We can make them more 
specific and detailed, but everything we do should aim to 
answer these two questions.
At this stage you may have questions about the questions! 
You may be wondering how an interest or challenge that 
you’ve identified can be explored with these questions, or 
you may want to see examples of more specific questions. 
Don’t worry! These are coming soon. In the remainder of 
this book, we will look into each of the steps of Exploratory 
Action Research in more detail, as follows: