RES 5040: Teacher as Researcher (spring 09)

My first interview was truly enlightening in a couple of ways. Obviously, it affected the way I viewed all of my questions and while I ended up sticking to each one of them, I became aware of how the wording of the question can influence its answer. However, more importantly, it affected my personal end goal of all of this research.

I began my research with my youngest teacher, Charlotte. Charlotte felt a strong need throughout the interview to provide answers that would help me out. She needed constant reassurance that any open and honest answer was the goal of our conversation. She also needed a lot of clarification about each question (I believe due to her own worry about expectations).

The impact on myself as a researcher and practitioner was the greatest because of the genuineness of our conversation. After a lot of reassurances, Charlotte really poured her heart out. Since my research largely involves the relationships of people and constructing a more productive dynamic for collaboration, I am finding that it can be a touchy subject. In order to create a better infrastructure facilitating collaboration, one has to confront the current means of collaboration and how those methods work or do not work. I have had some folks provide a few stock answers to avoid speaking too negatively about a situation or sometimes even a fellow staff member and others who sink into negativity so quickly it is difficult to find the constructiveness. Charlotte, however, dealt with it differently. Everything she said related to her role collaborating with others was directly associated with how it could make her a better teacher and help students grow. Charlotte is a very young teacher, so some of it could be chalked up to naivity or idealism, but she represented to me the teachers that I want to help most. She is truly missing something in her current climate. She needs more support and she genuinely wants to help kids in her classroom and otherwise. She does not see the barriers a veteran might, which can be refreshing, albeit at times unrealistic, but she has ideas on how she can improve and on how we can as a unit.

My end goal of this project aside from completing the research was to examine what elements teachers really want to improve collaboration which in turn will lead to improvement in technology integration and staff development. I was, with several other folks, creating a website to help teachers achieve the elements of a community of practice stated by several researchers including Wenger. I wanted teachers to affirm what I had been considering, principle among them the need for some sort of all-encompassing resource to collect the community's resourcesto tackle common problems across schools. Charlotte gave a real specific face to it for me as a person needing all of the above and almost depressingly low in expectations. For her, a professional conversation was an oddly foreign experience; a web resource and a standing engagement for support was like a dreamworld. So, now I have to tackle creating some sort of umbrella through which collaboration on any and all topics can occur and I have an audience for which to design. It made all of the research aspects of this assignment seem a little smaller, when there are people out there who will actually benefit.

Kyle Wood