A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

My Ideal Closings
 I tended to ask open, undirected 
questions, not using nomination in 
this part of the class.
All the children 
should have the 
chance to 
participate.
It lasted 5 minutes.
They have to show 
their learning.
I tended to use the same questions 
class after class, with the result that 
my students knew that the class 
was about to end. My questions 
were: ‘What was the class about? 
And what can you tell me about this 
class? What did you learn?’
Motivating 
activities.
“I decided to interview them, so 
after each activity we did with 
background music, I asked them 
about how they felt, if they had 
trouble concentrating, if they felt 
the music helped them complete 
the task and so on.”
Activities that help 
them to remember 
the contents the 
following class.

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22 
| What is Exploratory Action Research?
(3)
to her colleagues, she 
searched the web, and she decided to ask a colleague to
(4) her lesson. She also asked 
students to recall what they remembered from the lesson. 
After Andrea collected all the (5) 
she needed, she (6) 
on the situation and was able to (7) 
the situation better. 
Let’s look more closely at Andrea’s experience and try to 
understand it a bit more. She starts with what she calls a 
‘puzzle’ – not a definite ‘problem’, in her case, but something 
that doesn’t necessarily require an immediate solution. 
Rather than immediately trying out new ways of ending her 
class, she decided to explore the situation. 
In a sense, she ‘made the familiar strange’ by doing so –
she saw it in a new light. It is difficult to stand back from the 
problematic or puzzling situations we face but it can be very 
effective. Teachers are often tempted to jump in and solve 
things – but stepping back is also important. 
But what do you do when you explore? If you look at 
Andrea’s exploration, we can identify the following stages, 
which together characterise ‘exploratory research’: 
After all that process I decided to start my “real research” 
– that is how I call it – which has relation with my students. 
Firstly, I wanted to know more about how my students 
react at the end of the lesson. So I did a class and I asked 
a colleague to observe me doing the class, paying special 
attention to the wrapping-up and the reaction of my 
students. He took some notes and we had a meeting
to share the findings.
I did my class and I noticed that my students were not 
really engaged with wrapping-up. Moreover, not many
of them wanted to participate and some of them did not 
listen to their classmates talking about what the class
was about. In fact, the ones who participated in that
stage were the same ones who really like to participate 
usually without me asking them directly.
After that, my colleague and I had a meeting and he said 
that he noticed that most of the students started tidying 
up their desks and getting ready to leave and only a few 
paid attention. 
That was it … something clicked in my mind! I felt 
everything added up – what I felt was right: something 
was not working in my closing stage.
The next class I gave students a piece of paper and I told 
them to write what happened the previous class, I did that 
in Spanish so all of them had the same chances to 
express their ideas. These were my findings:
■
■
23 did not remember
■
■
3 did not answer
■
■
8 answered correctly
Most of the students did not remember and those who
did were the ones who really like to participate in classes.”