Chapter 6 Herding Cats
Making Sense of Adjustments for Students with a Disability through Action Research in Schools
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Abstract
The Australian National Consistent Collection of Data (NCCD) has forced all schools to make sense of the huge number of policies, including international Human Rights Agreements, that is impacting on their daily practice. The requirement to identify, record and collect evidence about adjustments for students with a disability has highlighted the need for teachers to understand their role as an actor in the policy cycle for several national and state policies including Disability Discrimination Act: Disability Standards (2005). In a way, this making sense of policy and applying it to practice can be likened to ‘herding cats’. ‘Herding cats’ is an idiom denoting a futile attempt to control or organize a class of inherently uncontrollable entities. In this chapter, the authors present two explanatory case studies about schools that have implemented a framework of action research to assist schools’ understanding of their obligations to policy. The major finding is that the action research framework has assisted teachers to make sense of the impact of compliance policies on their practice and at the same time improved teaching and learning in two secondary schools.