N Stygall- Mindlab 2018 blog

Why collect data? As practitioners, you have hunches about what is working and what isn’t working in your practice and for your students. However, as the Ministry of Education (n.d) points out “without evidence to back them up, hunches remain subjective.” The Ministry goes further, saying that well-planned data gathering can “reveal new patterns of insight, justify change and motivate colleagues, stakeholders, and school leaders into taking action.” (Ministry of Education, n.d) . Although you have checked your hunches/assumptions with research literature in RESEARCH assessment 1, you are required to include in your Action Plan for the Inquiry how you plan to collect data from the relevant members of your community to meet  criterion 3  of   RESEARCH 2 . You have to explain which data collection tool(s) you plan to use, and why you think these are suitable. You need at least one tool, e.g. survey form. You can have more than one method of data collection, e.g. survey ...

In week 21, the second week of the  “Learn”  phase of our Spiral of Inquiry, we started the journey of developing an action plan by discussing what  actions you need to take for your  Teacher Inquiry . In this third week of the  “Learn”  phase, we will consider the  professional learning  and the  professional relationships  you need to engage in ethically, when doing  educational research  and the use of  Kaupapa Maori approaches  to teacher inquiry. Professional Learning for Your Teacher Inquiry Your goal is to make meaningful changes in your professional practice by implementing your Teacher Inquiry. So far, in the earlier phases of the spiral of inquiry, you have developed your thinking about what is happening  (Scanning)  and why this is happening  (Focusing and Developing a Hunch),  these are all important learning processes (Kaser & Halbert, 2017). In this  “Learn”  phas...

Linking your Research Essay to your Action Plan For the past week, we have been looking at how analysing and critiquing the research literature gives you insights into what has been studied in your area of focus. The process of working on your Research Essay should provide you with specific questions for your inquiry. In this week and the following ones, following up on your inquiry questions, you are going to develop your  Action Plan  by considering what  actions  you will need to take and when, what  data collection methods  you need to use, designing the  data collection tools  and  integrating Kaupapa Māori  in your inquiry, then finally discussing the  potential impacts . When will you take action? Remember that at this stage, you  develop the Action Plan  but are not yet taking action. This week we are still in the  “Learn”  phase of the Spiral of Inquiry. Using the new learning you gained from th...