This week was stressful at first. Last weekend I cut out my data and taped them to different poster boards that had my subquestions on them. I turned it into arts and crafts which made it a little bit more fun to organize it, but didn’t really do much for me. Then on Sunday it said to write your results. I thought, “Hmm… I could write my results in a sentence or two, but I have to make it like six to seven pages.” So I sat there Sunday night and tried to think of what to do. Then on Monday, I sat down and looked at my boards and kept looking at them. I guess I thought if I stared at them something would come to me, didn’t happen. So I decided to write what I could about the setting and rewrote the methods section to past tense. Once that happened, I was able to keep writing the different sections.
So far I have received feedback from Sara and she suggested that I combine the analyzing and results together. I thought this was a good idea because it was quite repetitive and although some of the sections are supposed to be it seems, it seemed like there were a few times I was saying the exact same thing in the analyze data and result section. I didn’t know exactly what this would look like though. Then today I was able to read Cherie’s paper and she had a combination of the analyzed data and results in her paper which helped make Sara’s suggestion make a lot more sense in my head. So this week I feel like I have a good foundation of my rough draft to make the changes before I submit my final draft. It was good to be able to read other people’s papers to get ideas of how to make mine better and it was good to have others read my paper because it’s easier for others to see grammatical errors than for you to see them in your own paper.
This week seemed much more relaxed with not having to observe my students everyday. It gave me a lot of time to think over the past couple weeks and what happened. It also gave me a chance to get all my data printed out and in order to start going through this next week.
The question this week was a little difficult for me to understand, but as I looked up articles, things seemed to start fitting into place. As I started writing my paper for this week, it was a slow start, things didn’t seem to go together or flow at all. I always love having Twitter on Tuesday nights, because when I have weeks where I can’t seem to make things work, the Twitter session helps me understand. Unfortunately though this week there wasn’t one, which was fine, because now that I’m done, I realized it made me think a lot more and maybe even helped me learn more. Analyzing data has come with a lot of thinking for me. I have printed out all my final copies of data that I have gathered over the weeks and have a pile of it to wade through. I’ve begun to realize that when it comes to relationships with students there is a variable. The variable is that the students don’t know me that well, it’s seven boys, they aren’t real talkative and share your feelings like girls, so getting to know them is like breaking down a break wall. I have begun too, but I don’t think the time was long enough to really break down the wall all the way. So at the end of the week, if they did what they were supposed too and I didn’t really have to get after them, scores were high. However, if it was a rowdy week and I had to remind them to quiet down or get after them when they just wouldn’t listen, survey scores were down. That is the main thing I have thought about this week going through and averaging the survey scores and reading through the final focus group.
Tonight I went to the store and bought some poster board and tape. This weekend and during our week off, I’m going to write the three questions on my posters and tape the different data that relates to each question. This will make the data much easier to look at I think and I feel like it’ll be easier to analyze. It’ll also be a bit like a puzzle as I put all the pieces together. I figure if it relates to a crafty project maybe it’ll be more fun, at least this is what I’m going to keep telling myself if it stops snowing long enough to get anything productive done besides shoveling. An engaging action report should keep the reader’s focus and make them want to continue reading through the report. This week we read a few other reports that were conducted with qualitative research. As I was reading through “The Joy of Writing: Creating a Class Culture for Writing” I noticed that each of the titles for different sections were humorous, with what the section actually was in parenthesis. This made me want to read each section because, for example, instead of just “Introduction” the title was “What on Earth Was I Thinking?” This made the section start out more exciting. In the same paper, I was also interested in the section of “If I Could Do It All Over Again” because that allowed me to see what changes he would make next time and if I were to try and create a class culture for writing, I could do these things right at the beginning and see what would happen. In “Assessment: A New Science Teacher’s Attempt to Use Assessment as a Form of Conversation” the author put humor in the introduction which really caught my attention and kept me interested in reading the rest of the paper. While these are important characteristics to add into the report, there are a other essentials that allow for the report to be engaging because of the applicability to individuals.
I think that the main characteristic of an engaging action research report is the fact that they relate to real world problems we face in the classroom on a daily basis, not just figures found on a topic (Blichfeldt & Anderson, 2006). Action research reports allow us to read other’s actions and apply them to our own “problem.” There is a personal draw to the report because we have a reason and desire to read the report so we can apply what worked for others in our own classroom (Ferrance, 2000). This allows for automatic engagement in the report because it becomes personal rather than just informational. This then allows for the development of the teacher, rather than the acquisition of general knowledge as we incorporate what we have learned with our students (Ferrance, 2000). Another characteristic of an engaging action report is that it should allow a person who reads the information to reflect on their own teaching and then act (Harrison & Callan, 2013). The reader can decide “what can be taken from the story” (Blichfeldt & Anderson, 2006) and used in their professional lives, rather than being told what to take away because action research separates action from research (Ferrance, 2000). As a reader of a report, it is more helpful to read situations about what happened, rather than just be given numbers about a particular incident. This allows me to take away useful information about what works in words which can be easily analyzed and applied to my classroom, rather than just numbers which may be of no use at all. A third characteristic of an engaging action report is that it is cyclical (Ferrance, 2000). It gives the full circle of the topic by showing what worked and what didn’t work, as well as action taken after something didn’t work. Action research is nonlinear because it shows a pattern of planning, acting, observing, and the reflections of these three different aspects (Ferrance, 2000). An engaging action report does not start at point A and get to point B with research gathered from books and articles, it investigates the problem in a real world setting and applies the information gathered (Blichfeldt & Anderson, 2006). This allows the reader to know exactly what worked and what did not so they don’t have to make the same “mistakes” and may be able to have a “positive outcome” sooner. Engagement is key to keeping a reader’s attention throughout the report. An introduction that briefly explains the topic and catches the reader’s eye from the beginning is essential. Throughout the report, applicability to one’s own situation automatically allows for a reader to want to keep looking through the report. Also having the positive and negative aspects can ultimately make life easier because the reader can make necessary changes based on the given information, which would keep my attention, so I think it has the potential to keep other’s. I think these elements would make any action research report engaging to the reader. Bibliography Blichfeldt, B., & Andersen, J. (2006). Creating a wider audience for action research: Learning from case-study research. Journal of Research Practice, 2(1). Ferrance, E. (2000). Themes in education: Action research. Providence, RI: Brown University. Harrison, L., & Callan, T. (2013). Key research concepts in politics & international relations. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. This week’s question got me thinking probably a lot harder than I should’ve because it turned me into one mass of confusion then I stepped back and realized it wasn’t as difficult as I was making it out to be and was able to get my thoughts down on paper. There were a few different comments or quotes that different people used in their blogs that stuck out to me. Both Sara and Sarah mentioned that there is not a single correct way to format your research paper. This helps me because I’m a person that always feels like if I did my assignment differently that I did it wrong and it gets me stressed out until I get a grade back and realize we did the same thing just went different ways with the project. Theresa mentioned writing an outline and filling it in with the needed information which I think will be very helpful to keep everything flowing smoothly. I asked three questions in my proposal and then answered them and it worked well, I imagine an outline would work much the same way and be very useful.
I’m ready to start going through all my final results and seeing what I have now that it can all be together and I don’t just have pieces from the weeks. I’m also ready to be done with the observations and keep doing the flipped classroom in my classroom because it’s working and not because I’m trying to get any information out of this type of learning. I’m wondering if it’ll possibly go better because I can be solely focused on classroom management and what the kids are doing rather than worrying about my observations as well. It’ll be interesting to compare the results in my head in a few weeks between the two. This week I did four days of observations and did a focus group and final survey today (Friday). I don’t know if I got any really good information out of the focus group because my boys were in silly moods and couldn’t stick to the question at hand. It made it difficult, but I think I may have gotten a few snippets of information I can use. Last focus group we got through the questions in 10 minutes, they were focused, it was new, today it took 45 minutes to get through the seven questions. I can see hours of transcribing in my weekend.
In the end I had like fifteen days of observations. I don’t know how I got that much, but I guess it’s okay. I’m glad to be done with this phase of the research because it took away from some of my tasks in class that are hard to manage while also observing. I feel like the boys got the point of why I did the project today, because they realized at the end of our focus group today, that they enjoy math more because they know me better and we can joke around and be silly. Because of that their grades have actually improved because when they enjoy a class they put more effort into it. The format of your research should be beneficial and appropriate to the audience which you choose to address. The audience which I am choosing to address are the members of this class as well as teachers who think that using a flipped classroom in their classroom may be beneficial. Marshall and Rossman (1999) offer four suggestions to consider when formatting your final paper:
Dissemination means “to spread your information” (Dissemination, n.d.). This is the last phase of the research process as the information is prepared to communicate findings to an appropriate audience (Whittemore & Melkus, n.d.). In order to be most effective, the plan of how you will disseminate your findings needs to be developed prior to completing the study (Whittemore & Melkus, n.d.). Dissemination can be done through a variety of methods, some of which are presenting at a conference or publishing your information in a professional journal (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). It is important to get the information and data you have collected into the hands of other professionals in your field. “Your contribution is to share your knowledge so that others can learn from it and develop it” (McNiff & Whitehead, p. 166, 2009). In order to disseminate the research I have done over the past couple weeks I plan on presenting at a conference. The school I teach at is part of an association that has a teacher conference each fall. At this conference, they request for teachers to volunteer to lead breakout sessions. I am planning to lead one of these sessions at our next conference in the fall of 2016 to present “The Benefits of Building Relationships and Improving Grades with the Flipped Classroom.” Bibliography dissemination. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved November 12, 2015, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dissemination Marshall, C. & Rossman, G. (1999). Designing qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Merriam, S., & Tisdell, E. (2016). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation (Fourth ed.). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons. Whittemore, R., & Melkus, G. (n.d.). Design decisions in research. Retrieved November 10, 2015, from http://www.esourceresearch.org/eSourceBook/DesignDecisionsinResearch/7TheDisseminationPhase/tabid/668/Default.aspx McNiff, J., & Whitehead, J. (2009). Doing and writing action research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. |
AuthorI teach at Cook Inlet Academy in Soldotna, Alaska. Depending on the time of day, I am teaching any grades between 2nd and 11th. Archives
December 2015
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