DESIGNED ACTION SAMPLING
Designed action sampling is a new scientific method that can help teachers improve their practice. Teachers co-design action-oriented step-wise experiments that are then carried out by other teachers, who reflect in written form afterwards upon effects they see. The method has been used by around 4,000 teachers and 36,000 students to form large communities around school development, vocational education and teaching in segregated areas.
Below you can watch an introductory video about Designed Action Sampling, and download a couple of research articles about the method. Further down, you will find some translated chapters from our method book about DAS.
THE METHOD BOOK
In 2021 I wrote a book in Swedish about Designed Action Sampling. This book is not yet available in English. But below I make some of the chapters available in English. The translation is not professional, but will still give a pretty accurate account of the book's content. One day we hopefully will be able to do a "proper" translation of this book into English. If we can find a publisher for it, that is.
The journey behind the book
This book contains insights generated during a nine-year learning journey, from 2012 to 2020. The work has involved thousands of people - teachers, school leaders, school developers, students and other participants in preschools and schools mainly in Uddevalla, Åstorp, Varberg, Skurup, Skara, Sundsvall, Kungsbacka, Gothenburg, Falkenberg, Vänersborg and Hultsfred. The work has been financed mainly by Uddevalla municipality through a unique research collaboration with Chalmers University of Technology and the research company Me Analytics...
An introduction
It has been said that in 1899, the head of the US Patent Office, Charles H. Duell, submitted his resignation on the grounds:
Everything that can be invented has now been invented, so we might as well shut down the patent office.
Looking back, we can laugh at the idea that the world would have been fully developed over 120 years ago. We can also reflect on the staggering social developments that the next 120 years...
Chapter 1: Teacher-led science in education
Scientific teachers. Taste the words. What feelings do they evoke? Curiosity? Scepticism? Indifference? It probably varies depending on who you ask. But regardless of what you feel as a teacher, since 2010 there is a law in Sweden requiring teachers to work scientifically. Which seems reasonable, if the alternative is teachers working unscientifically. However, it may still be appropriate to start a methodology book on the subject with a little in-depth study of what...
Chapter 2: Value creation in education
What is valuable? We are all confronted with this simple question every day. Work or family? Career or friends? Travelling or saving money? Life constantly confronts us with required choices between incomparable values. Figuring out what will be a good balance between conflicting choices is not easy. One often has to rely on feelings to achieve balance in life. A term that tries to capture this is work-life balance.
We like to calculate things in...
Chapter 3: Education in balance
This chapter is about a simple but powerful theory, a theory of balance, and its various implications for education. It is not about budget balance, but rather about what happens when people achieve a good balance between their own learning and creating value for others – work-learn balance. One way to achieve education with such a balance is to work with designed action sampling. There are other ways, as will be shown later in...
Chapter 4: Designed action sampling in education
Now we come to the main theme of the book: designed actions sampling. What exactly is this? There are a few different ways to answer that question. The answers are slightly different in length. We will start with the shortest answer:
Designed actions sampling is a new scientific method that works well in education.
What is new is that we have combined several established scientific perspectives, methods and techniques that have probably never been used together...
Chapter 5: Logic – Six theoretical ways of thinking
The first six parts of this review take us on a journey through the wonderful and confusing world of philosophy. More specifically, the world of philosophy of science. It addresses questions such as what can be considered real, knowable and scientific. Philosophy never provides clear-cut answers, but instead offers different ways of thinking and perspectives that then influence everything you do in practice.
From clinical research we bring the idea of learning by helping others....
Chapter 6: Model – Eight strategic working models
When we come to the eight working models, we leave philosophical deep questions and become more concrete. This is about what to do in practical terms and how to do it. However, we are still at a relatively general and strategic level. The models can be said to constitute general principles that we then try to follow and be inspired by in our practical work with data collection and data analysis.
The first of the...
Chapter 7: Tactics – Eight techniques for data collection
As data collection in designed action sampling is almost entirely done using the form in Figure 4.2, all eight data collection techniques below are linked to different parts of the form.
Experience sampling is an established scientific method for collecting data from participants in research studies. The action-reflection link means that each reflection collected should be based on a completed action. Longitudinal data is what you get when many forms with different tasks over time...