RES 5040: Teacher as Researcher (spring 09)

This week, I conducted my first and only pre-study interview of the class that is participating in my Action Research Project. This class has some behavior issues and many students' effort is seriously lacking, so they don't often have the luxury of working in pairs or small groups. However, the very nature of literature circles requires that they do just such a thing, and I wanted to see how they interacted with one another before this instructional strategy was introduced.

So this week, after reading the narrative poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert W. Service at the conclusion of our poetry unit, I allowed the kids to work in pairs or groups of threes while they completed a poem analysis and some comprehension questions based on the poem. I actually uttered the sentence that my students very rarely hear: "You may pick your own partners." In a class such as this one, statements like this one are usually a problem waiting to happen...choosing their own partners means that they are obviously going to choose to work with friends and do more socializing than actual work. So at the possible risk of wasting class time, I let them choose partners for the sake of research.

This set up an ideal observation setting for me. I was free to circulate the room and listen in on conversations, check work progress, and answer questions, all while taking some observational notes on a clipboard. There were only thirteen students in class on this day, and they seperated themselves into six distinct groups. There were three pairs, two groups of three students, and one student who (not surprisingly) chose to work alone.

What really surprised me the most was the amount of information I could have collected. I really thought the observational process would be simple, but then I realized that trying to oversee six different groups of children really meant there were six different conversations, six different thought processes, and six different work products beging created simultaneously. It was very challenging to be able to offer help and answer questions while also just trying to observe how the students were working together.

I made some very sketchy notes, but quoting any conversation was almost impossible. I was able to go back and make some more detailed notes after the class had ended, but it was much harder than I thought to conduct a formal observation in the classroom while the students were working. I did learn a lot about the observation process, and I plan on using this first attempt at an interview as a learning experience for me. Now I know what to expect when we begin the actual literature circles. I will need to do a better job of removing myself from students, so that the observation process is not focused on answering questions rather than observing. I need to make sure that I am circulating the room constantly, and try to get more detailed converstation between students while they are working. I need to be able to pay attention to what the students are working on, and what they are discussing with group members whether it is assignment-related or not.

Bottom line, I learned that observation of an entire class of students is very involved, but it can yield great information about group dynamic and work ethic in a classroom. It will definitely be a beneficial data collection tool during the research process.

Amy Galloway