Improving Participation of the Staff Meeting in a University Essay

Improving Participation of the Staff Meeting in a University - Essay ExampleAs I noted in my earlier achievement Research Project Plan, which basically became the manual for this query, Hill defines management as getting things done through and with other people (Hill, ibid.). As the time has elapsed between piece of writing that plan and concluding this investigate, I have conk even more convinced that co-operation (the through and with other people of Hills notion) is an essential behaviour if the work of our group is to prosper.It will be recalled from that projection 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 Spence r (1994 173) have called actionable outcomes in order to bring about the organisational change that I search 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 scientists dilemma of choosing between rigour and relevance central to the way in which he has adapted Lewins Action Research heritage. He concludes thatFrom the action researchers 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 adjudge 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 a ppropriateness, rigour and relevance within the research as a whole.2.An fib 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 analogous year with the data being analysed during the Christmas/New Year break.2.1Reflective research diaryFirstly, I began to write my reflective research journal. This was quite a tight task to maintain because although the early enthusiasm ensured that I sat down regularly at my computer I fo und 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 diaryAs a result of this bother 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 grave 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