As I began this course, I was not too overly excited to spend the last few weeks of my summer break conducting research. In Leading with Passion and Knowledge, Dana uses the terms “practitioner research”, “classroom research”, and “practitioner inquiry” interchangeably. She goes on to say that she prefers the term “inquiry” more frequently because it does not carry the same baggage as the term “research” does. (p. 6) I couldn’t help but laugh when I read that. The term “research” definitely did bring some baggage and many negative connotations to mind when I began this course. I decided to attempt to keep an open mind and see where this course and the action research wonderings or plan took me. I have to say that the hardest part was determining the subject matter I wanted to research. I felt that I had to analyze the whole process first. By doing so, I was defeated before I could even state a wondering. There are so many topics that I could research that I felt overwhelmed. It was even more daunting to think that I could not successfully analyze any of them.
How did I get over this huge obstacle? I turned to my classmates and their blogs and the discussion board. The discussion board is a great way of not feeling alone in this whole process. The only criticism I have of the board is the way it is formatted. It is not easy to read or follow. The different colors are great to let you know which ones you’ve read or not read, but the overall format makes it difficult to go through the posts. That aside, I felt better knowing that others were struggling with the same issues as I. These discussions helped me to narrow down a topic. The Dana text helped me to define the topic in a way that I felt I could successfully measure my findings. I decided to compare 9th grade learning-disabled special education students enrolled in co-teach core classes to 9th grade learning –disabled special education students who are in core classes without a special education co-teacher. I felt that by narrowing the student choice to 9th grade, which is where my campus offers the majority of co-teaching options in core classes, I could be more successful in analyzing surveys, test data, field tests, etc. I also decided to limit the special education label to learning disabled students. I did this because I needed to limit and somehow make reasonable connections between the two groups of students. I know that determining the success or lack thereof of co-teaching is going to be a difficult, but worthwhile journey. I also feel very closely connected to my chosen topic, as a special education teacher who will be co-teaching two different core subjects for the first time this year.
The most helpful videos to me during this course were the ones featuring Johnny Briseno, Timothy Chargois, and Kirk Lewis. As with most things, being exposed to real-life examples helps making the learning more meaningful and useful. I enjoyed listening to their personal stories. It gave me a chance to see where I should be headed.
I think that while I’ve researched many other action research plans and topics, I could spend weeks and weeks doing more of the same. There is so much information available on the web that it is staggering.
Finally, the opportunity to blog about our plan and our journey was so very beneficial to me. I do enjoy and benefit greatly from reading other’s plans and wonderings. Blogging will be beneficial to all of us as we continue on this journey. I would like to see a blog set up for each Lamar course to allow us to communicate more effectively than we sometimes can on the discussion board. I have posted questions under the “Help” topic before and not gotten answers from anyone. If we had a blog that we logged into daily during the duration of the course, I think many of us could help each other answer questions or come up with ideas in order to be more successful and give us that feeling of community we sometimes miss out on being in an online course.
