Method To My Madness

Hey everybody! It’s been awhile since my last blog post, but I am excited to start blogging more consistently again. For this week’s post, I will be reflecting on the development of my methods as well as for discussing what I think my primary weaknesses are for my methods. Since I have not had my paper critiqued yet, I will focus on what I believe is the weakest part of my method, as well as for what feedback I anticipate receiving for this section.

For the development of my methods, I had to draw from multiple sources to develop procedures that were comprehensive enough to gather the information that I need. Since there were no ethnographies done on a single charter school, I had to incorporate aspects of larger charter school studies, to understand what information that I was trying to get, traditional school studies, to determine how to collect my data, and then also ethnographies, to understand how to develop a holistic approach of the environment that I was studying. Fortunately, I had a source that explained the usefulness and quality of each method used to research charter schools, and so this was an indispensable resource in developing my methods.

After researching the various methods that could be used to obtain a complete understanding of a school, I decided that I needed to surveys, interviews, and classroom observations. The rationale behind using these methods were that in order to understand a school, it needs to be understood both inside and outside the classroom, and from as many perspectives as possible. By surveying teachers, it allows me to gain a comprehensive understanding of their thoughts and opinions about the school. Then, by interviewing teachers and administration, it allows me to get a more in depth understanding of how the school operates and has changed, according to the faculty who have been at the school the longest. Finally, the classroom observations will show me how teachers and students interact with one another, which can give clues as to what the classroom atmosphere is and how student learning in affected by this.

Although I have a good understanding of how I will be collecting this information and have taken appropriate measures to ensure the ethicality of my project and the confidentiality of my participants, I am still not completely sure how I will be conducting my data analysis. The problem with my methods and research is that the data I will be getting is very open-ended, and so I am unsure of what type of responses that I will actually be receiving. My current plan for this is that I intend to sort data into categories based on the five components which I believe cause student and school success, which is based off the literature I read; however, it is possible that there may be factors that affect student success which I may not be currently aware of. Because of this, my analysis will have to adapt to the data and responses that I receive to extract meaningful results. Although the plan for doing this is to carefully record my data, and then compare it to other responses to look for similarities and commonalities, I am still unsure about how effective this method will be, based upon my data.

Besides this though, I am feeling confident about my research and am excited to begin doing so. Until then, I will keep on working on perfecting my research and methods. With that being said, this concludes this week’s blog. See you all next week!