Reflexionar para mejorar la práctica: una experiencia de investigación-acción educativa

Abstract

Educational experience shows meaningful efforts in the formation of teachers; however, results do not show the expected changes, as the same problems persist in the classroom without having reached concrete and definitive solutions. The research paper entitled "professional development of educators through educational action research" tries to find a new way of achieving professional development of in-service teachers by means of action research.

This research work is developed along a six-stage structure as follows: First, the group of researchers perform an approximation to the educational action research method. Second, theoretical assumptions: a theoretical foundation that can be the basis of educational action research is searched. Third, selection and training by external researchers, of a group of internal researchers until the problem that each of them is going to research is stated. Fourth, projects are executed in the classroom. In this stage, the researchers made their problem clear and they searched for and implemented several intervention strategies for its solution. The external researchers accompanied this process. Fifth, Cross-section analysis of the classroom projects. In this stage, an analysis of all the classroom projects implemented by the external researchers was done. The last stage has been called the i. a. e. (educational action research) as a means for the achievement of the professional development of educators. The final result is the learning achieved by the internal and external researchers, which confirms that i. a. e. is an appropriate means to convert theory into the practice of the educators' day-to-day activities, thus enhancing their true professional development.