So Close, Yet So Far

Hey Everybody! So this is the last week that I have until I am out on my own actually implementing my research! I am really excited about starting all of this and have made pretty significant progress since last week.

When I wrote my blog post last week, I did not have a schedule for when I would be sitting in on classrooms, my consent forms did not provide sufficient assurances that confidentiality and anonymity would be kept, and my methods section was a total mess. Although I have not completely finished all of these tasks, I am a lot closer than I was before.

During this past week, I met with the last teacher that I needed to talk to, developed a tentative schedule for when I will be observing all of the classes, developed drafts of emails to send to all of the teachers, improved my consent forms and interview questions, changed my blog formatting to be more user friendly, edited my literature review, and completely reworked my methods section.

 

(Me this past week)

I know that was a pretty long list of stuff that I did, so I am going to break it down and explain what still needs to be done and what exactly I did.

The first thing that I am going to talk about is about the logistics for my project. Since I only have two weeks to conduct my primary research, I developed a tentative schedule for when I will be sitting in on the different classes that I need to observe. Before I email these teachers about this schedule though, I still need to figure out when exactly I will be interviewing each teacher. I have a draft of an email that is ready to send, and so I just need to do that. Once I have planned my interviews out, then I can solidify my observation schedule.

Second, this week I finished working on all of the supporting documents that I need for my project. Although most of these documents were already written, I edited and finalized these documents this week so that they are ready to be used for my research. In addition to finalizing these documents, I also created an overall coding sheet that specifically states the information that I need to collect for my research. Before this week, I did not know what information I actually wanted to collect for my research, and so developing this document was really useful in justifying my methods, determining what information I need, and organizing my methods section.

Lastly, in terms of the actual paper itself, I am almost done editing my literature review and am currently working on my methods section. Besides coordinating logistics with teachers, editing, finishing, and perfecting this paper is going to be my primary focus this week. Since I am pretty much done with the rest of my classes, I will have a lot of time to dedicate to finishing up these two sections of my paper. After I finish this though, then I will be ready to go out on my own and do my research.

(When class finally ends and I get to conduct my research!)

           That’s all for this week. I look forward to updating everybody again next week with the status of my project!

Preparation in Progress

Hey everybody! Only a couple more weeks until I am out conducting my independent research. Because this time is approaching so quickly, today’s blog post will discuss where I am in implementing my methods and how this correlates with the schedule I created for myself several posts back.

              Currently, I have not started conducting my research yet, however I am in the process of preparing to begin my research soon. For my research, I will be implementing surveys, interviews, and classroom observations to get as complete of an understanding of the school I will be researching as possible. For my surveys, all my questions have been written, the survey has been created on Survey Monkey, and the link has been sent out to Mrs. Haag to be distributed to teachers.  

For my interviews, I have informally talked to all eight of the teachers that I want to interview, and have received verbal consent to interview these teachers. Additionally, my interview questions for these teachers have been written, and I am currently in the process of planning the logistics for when I can interview these teachers. I have not yet asked the head of school for an interview yet, however I have been given permission to conduct my research in the building.

Lastly, for my classroom observations, I have directly spoken to all but one teacher about observing their classrooms; however, this one teacher is aware that I would like to observe their class, but I just need to find them to confirm this in person. From the teachers I have spoken to, I have been given their teaching schedules, and so I am in the process of planning the days and times for when I want to come in and observe classes. Once I have received the schedule from the last teacher, then I will finalize my schedule for when I want to come in. This is so not only I can plan, but also so that the teachers can have advance notice for when they should be expecting me. Additionally, for my observations, I have the coding sheet that I intend to use for my observations. Because of this, once I am finished with my classes on February 2, then I will be ready to observe classes starting the following week.

Currently, I am almost on schedule. This past week was supposed to be used for gathering general information about the school I will be studying; however, after the critique of my methods, this part has been for the most part removed. In my schedule, I said that I planned to start conducting interviews in the next week. Because I am currently focused on perfecting my methods and literature review sections, I do not plan to do interviews this week; however, I will send out emails this week to set up interviews for the next several weeks. Despite this setback, I believe that this will not be a problem because I will have over three weeks to conduct these interviews. As long as they are all complete by February 18, then I will have enough time to do my data analysis. With this being said though, I would like to be done conducting interviews by February 11, so I can get a head start on my data analysis.

That’s all for this week! I will be continuing to prepare for conducting my research, and look forward to blogging again soon. See you all next week!

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!