Research Methods and Analysis
My job as a teacher who loves her school and wants it to be a place where teachers and students feel trusted and supported, is to work as hard as I can to be a trusting, generous, helpful and cooperative colleague. My guess was that one way to do this is to be a thoughtful, supportive collaborator who also challenges my colleagues to push themselves. For this research, I collaborated with three of my teaching partners – in one case on a project (with the math teacher) and in the other case in an integration of material (with the American History and Biology teachers). I documented the experiences of all involved: teachers, students, and myself. Here’s what I hoped to learn and how I gathered the information:
Teachers
From teachers (specifically my partners and perhaps other members of our 11th grade team) I wanted to learn how they experienced our collaborations, in what areas they wanted to be challenged, what was working and what wasn’t. I wanted to to hear from the math teacher, specifically what was helpful in project planning and implementation for her, while also tracking my own experiences and where I felt most satisfied, challenged or frustrated. I also wanted to find out if a more superficial collaboration of material integration would lead to deeper collaborations through conversations with the biology and American history teachers and what they were experiencing. I gathered this information using conversations with my partners and for the math teacher and me, project journaling before, during, and after the project. I analyzed this information by noting trends in attitude, and where/why attitudes shifted. I used this information to help define terms, record goals, make adjustments, and note observations regarding structures and methods that worked or were helpful to creating a mutually beneficial collaboration, as well as barriers that we could work through together.
Here is how I gathered and analyzed data from teachers (including myself):
Journaling: This was the primary way I tracked my own observations and experiences as well as how I adjusted my contributions in collaborations based on feedback and observations of my teaching partners and my students. My journaling focused on times where a collaboration went particularly well and analyzed what made it successful. It also focused on the setbacks, barriers, or frustrations to collaboration that I could identify and my reflections on what could be adjusted or improved – as well as follow-up to those adjustments. My intention was to create a feedback loop so that I was constantly recording, reflecting, adjusting, and reflecting as I worked to improve my role as a collaborator.
I also planned to looked at the project journal of the math teacher who had agreed to journal during our integrated project, though this ended up taking the form of intermittent email reflections. However, I also met with her almost every day primarily to discuss our observations and reflections and to make adjustments to our project as needed.
Focus group: During the first semester I met with my 11th grade team, most of whom I had collaborated with on a project (big or small) in the past to record and try to understand their attitudes toward collaboration in general and my collaborations with them specifically. With this initial focus group I hoped to get a baseline attitude toward collaboration and integrated projects along with reasons for their answers. This helped me in understanding where some of their fears around collaboration were and gave me an idea of what they liked about collaboration so that I could work from those positives in creating more fulfilling collaborationsFocus Group: From responses on the first survey, I chose 5-6 students of different experiences and with varying attitudes toward school, projects, and collaboration for a focus group that met at the end of the integrated project with math class. I recorded and then transcribed their responses. I asked questions about the benefits and challenges of the student collaborations and critique sessions during the writing of their stories (focusing specifically on the use of protocols and on workshop groupings). I also asked how having two teachers working across disciplines impacted their sense of community, as well as their perspectives on discipline integration. From them I was able to get more detailed responses about the benefits and challenges of collaboration, how they had experienced both student and teacher collaborations during the year and how I might better facilitate those collaborations in the future.
Exit Cards: I used exit cards regularly for all students in the 11th grade class at least once a week to track attitude, engagement, and understanding during the integrated math/English project. Generally, these exit cards consisted of two or three questions such as: What do you need help with? What questions do you have? To gauge shifts in student attitude, I also asked students to list two words that described how they were feeling about the project on the bottom of every exit card and then I analyzed these exit cards by taking those two words and creating a Wordle, which highlighted the most commonly listed words by making them bigger than the other words. This was a quick way for me to see what the general consensus of the class was and also showed the shifts in attitude in a strikingly visual way. I also used them whenever I was implementing a new structure or making adjustments to an existing structure in order to gauge effectiveness. These exit cards acted as a feedback loop from which I could make adjustments or address concerns that my students were having throughout the process.
Reflections: I assigned two different reflections to the entire 11th grade class, one after several smaller collaborations in the first semester and one at the end of the more integrated and longer-term collaboration in the second semester. Through these I was able to record what students saw as the benefits and struggles of each collaboration, how relevant the projects were, how challenging or rigorous the projects were, how proud they were of their final product, how much their understanding was improved through the project, and what they would change about the project to make it better. I took several open-ended questions from each reflection, coded the responses based on emerging themes, and compiled the results in graphs to better understand the findings and to help me make connections about what I was seeing.
Observations: I used observations during project work on the integrated project between math and English to track both student engagement and the quality of student collaborations. These observations helped me to identify two important areas: 1) how teacher collaborations and choices impacted student experiences and 2) where I could better facilitate student collaborations. For the first, I looked for evidence of student engagement (staying focused on the task/topic, eye contact and conversation between students) and quality of work/discussion and noted if there was something specific that increased student engagement and participation (student choice? time pressures? relevance of the task/topic?). I looked for those tasks where students were most engaged and tried to identify if this engagement was the result of teacher collaboration by triangulating my observational notes with other data sources. For the second area, I looked to identify methods and elements in student collaborations that engaged and supported students and those that didn’t. These observations helped me to make adjustments as needed.
Teachers
From teachers (specifically my partners and perhaps other members of our 11th grade team) I wanted to learn how they experienced our collaborations, in what areas they wanted to be challenged, what was working and what wasn’t. I wanted to to hear from the math teacher, specifically what was helpful in project planning and implementation for her, while also tracking my own experiences and where I felt most satisfied, challenged or frustrated. I also wanted to find out if a more superficial collaboration of material integration would lead to deeper collaborations through conversations with the biology and American history teachers and what they were experiencing. I gathered this information using conversations with my partners and for the math teacher and me, project journaling before, during, and after the project. I analyzed this information by noting trends in attitude, and where/why attitudes shifted. I used this information to help define terms, record goals, make adjustments, and note observations regarding structures and methods that worked or were helpful to creating a mutually beneficial collaboration, as well as barriers that we could work through together.
Here is how I gathered and analyzed data from teachers (including myself):
Journaling: This was the primary way I tracked my own observations and experiences as well as how I adjusted my contributions in collaborations based on feedback and observations of my teaching partners and my students. My journaling focused on times where a collaboration went particularly well and analyzed what made it successful. It also focused on the setbacks, barriers, or frustrations to collaboration that I could identify and my reflections on what could be adjusted or improved – as well as follow-up to those adjustments. My intention was to create a feedback loop so that I was constantly recording, reflecting, adjusting, and reflecting as I worked to improve my role as a collaborator.
I also planned to looked at the project journal of the math teacher who had agreed to journal during our integrated project, though this ended up taking the form of intermittent email reflections. However, I also met with her almost every day primarily to discuss our observations and reflections and to make adjustments to our project as needed.
Focus group: During the first semester I met with my 11th grade team, most of whom I had collaborated with on a project (big or small) in the past to record and try to understand their attitudes toward collaboration in general and my collaborations with them specifically. With this initial focus group I hoped to get a baseline attitude toward collaboration and integrated projects along with reasons for their answers. This helped me in understanding where some of their fears around collaboration were and gave me an idea of what they liked about collaboration so that I could work from those positives in creating more fulfilling collaborationsFocus Group: From responses on the first survey, I chose 5-6 students of different experiences and with varying attitudes toward school, projects, and collaboration for a focus group that met at the end of the integrated project with math class. I recorded and then transcribed their responses. I asked questions about the benefits and challenges of the student collaborations and critique sessions during the writing of their stories (focusing specifically on the use of protocols and on workshop groupings). I also asked how having two teachers working across disciplines impacted their sense of community, as well as their perspectives on discipline integration. From them I was able to get more detailed responses about the benefits and challenges of collaboration, how they had experienced both student and teacher collaborations during the year and how I might better facilitate those collaborations in the future.
Exit Cards: I used exit cards regularly for all students in the 11th grade class at least once a week to track attitude, engagement, and understanding during the integrated math/English project. Generally, these exit cards consisted of two or three questions such as: What do you need help with? What questions do you have? To gauge shifts in student attitude, I also asked students to list two words that described how they were feeling about the project on the bottom of every exit card and then I analyzed these exit cards by taking those two words and creating a Wordle, which highlighted the most commonly listed words by making them bigger than the other words. This was a quick way for me to see what the general consensus of the class was and also showed the shifts in attitude in a strikingly visual way. I also used them whenever I was implementing a new structure or making adjustments to an existing structure in order to gauge effectiveness. These exit cards acted as a feedback loop from which I could make adjustments or address concerns that my students were having throughout the process.
Reflections: I assigned two different reflections to the entire 11th grade class, one after several smaller collaborations in the first semester and one at the end of the more integrated and longer-term collaboration in the second semester. Through these I was able to record what students saw as the benefits and struggles of each collaboration, how relevant the projects were, how challenging or rigorous the projects were, how proud they were of their final product, how much their understanding was improved through the project, and what they would change about the project to make it better. I took several open-ended questions from each reflection, coded the responses based on emerging themes, and compiled the results in graphs to better understand the findings and to help me make connections about what I was seeing.
Observations: I used observations during project work on the integrated project between math and English to track both student engagement and the quality of student collaborations. These observations helped me to identify two important areas: 1) how teacher collaborations and choices impacted student experiences and 2) where I could better facilitate student collaborations. For the first, I looked for evidence of student engagement (staying focused on the task/topic, eye contact and conversation between students) and quality of work/discussion and noted if there was something specific that increased student engagement and participation (student choice? time pressures? relevance of the task/topic?). I looked for those tasks where students were most engaged and tried to identify if this engagement was the result of teacher collaboration by triangulating my observational notes with other data sources. For the second area, I looked to identify methods and elements in student collaborations that engaged and supported students and those that didn’t. These observations helped me to make adjustments as needed.