A core reform area of President Obama’s Race to the Top (RTT) framework, the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) program, offered funding to states for the development of their own data systems. As a result, Arizona received funding to build a longitudinal student data system. However the targeted audience—teachers—needed training to move from a state of ‘data rich but information poor’ to one of developing actionable knowledge.

In this mixed methods action research study, six teachers from three schools participated in job-embedded data-informed decision making (DIDM) and root cause analysis (RCA) professional development to improve their abilities to employ DIDM and RCA strategies to determine root causes for student achievement gaps. This study was based on the theories of situated learning, specifically the concept of communities of practice (CoP), change theory, and the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM). Because teachers comprise most of the workforce in a district, it is important to encourage them to shift from working in isolation to effectively implement and sustain changes in practice. To address this concern, an online wiki provided an avenue for participants to interact, reflect, and share experiences across schools as they engaged in the application of new learning.

The results from this ten-week study indicated an increase in participant readiness levels to: (a) use and manage data sources, (b) apply strategies, and (c) collaborate with others to solve problems of practice. Results also showed that participants engaged in collaborative conversation using the online wiki when they wanted to share concerns or gain further information to make decisions. The online collaboration results indicated higher levels of online discussion occurred when participants were attempting to solve a problem of practice during the learning process.

Overall, participants (a) used collaborative strategies to seek, create, and/or utilize multiple sources of data, not just student learning data, (b) worked through implementation challenges when making changes in practice, and (c) sought further types of data collection to inform their decisions about root causes. Implications from this study warrant further investigation into the use of an online CoP as an avenue for increasing teacher collaboration across schools.

Recently, a student in a Maricopa County, Arizona area school district drowned during a physical education class, resulting in a heightened awareness of school aquatics safety guidelines. The goal of this study was to use Wenger's idea of nurturing a Community of Practice (CoP) with the existing physical education CoP at GFJRHS (school pseudonym), to examine the current curriculum and enhance the program and safety standards. The study duration was a five-week period; the participants were 7th grade males. This action research addressed the following questions: 1.)To what extent does the new swim curriculum increase students' (a) self-efficacy for swimming, (b) self-efficacy for water safety, (c) perception of swim skills, and (d) perception of water safety skills? 2.) How, and to what extent, do students value different observational learning techniques presented during the swim unit? 3.) To what extent does the new swim curriculum increase students' swimming capabilities? 4.) How does working as a Community of Practice influence implementing an enhanced swim curriculum? 5.) What challenges and improvements do participants report during the enhanced curriculum? A triangulation mixed methods design was used to determine whether observational learning techniques and mini aquatics safety lessons incorporated into the curriculum improved students' swimming ability, self-efficacy, and safety knowledge. Pre-and post-test swim assessments, pre- and post-test surveys, focus group interviews and researcher journal observations provided data for the study. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected to integrate the strengths of the varied forms of research. Cronbach's coefficient α was computed for the reliability of the survey and a multivariate repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to determine whether the new swim curriculum increased students' self-efficacy for swimming, self-efficacy for water safety, perception of swim skills, perception of water safety skills, and swimming capabilities. Results of this study indicated students' self-efficacy and perception of water safety skills increased, students' ability and perception of swimming skills increased, students valued all observational learning techniques, and teachers felt that functioning as a CoP was crucial to the process.