Collaboration and Research All in One

Tonight, I began reading, "Collaborative Action Research for English Language Teachers" by Anne Burns. I was encouraged to read that although she is writing from an Australian context that she addresses issues of a lack of motivation with students who were required to take English courses for reasons related to immigration. After having a paper published that I wrote with another professor, I decided to find out some more efficient ways for working with a colleague. In fact, I wish I would've read up on the subject before I actually wrote the paper with another colleague. We had a lot of frustrating experiences but it was still a good experience overall. Nonetheless, I hope to learn more about collaboration through research to have more positive experiences in the future. I'm hoping that this book will have positive implications for what I do in my current setting. I know that I have a lot of areas to improve in, especially regarding teaching, and I hope I can work with colleagues to learn from them and hopefully to even have them correct me in my teaching weaknesses. I also believe that the best way to improve the structures at a university are through research, rather than complaining, though the latter seems to take less energy (at least in our thinking) and probably more time than we realize.