The End of the Beginning...

I feel like the end of the beginning is in sight in regards to this course's mini-inquiry project.  I think that I've developed, with helpful feedback from Kristen and classmates, a good research problem, purpose statement, research questions, conceptual map, and narrative to go along with the map.  Of course I need to complete the IRB proposal but that will be this week's work...

So it's now on to the middle of the project.  For my case study, that will mean determining the participant pool and sampling that pool purposefully.  My method of data collection will be interviewing.  This method makes the most sense in terms of qualitative research in that I want to collect first-hand information from participants in an engaging and in the most authentic way as possible.

This kind of interviewing will be new for me.  Before I became a teacher, I spent years working in retail, mostly as a manager.  I interviewed prospective employees many times although I was never really comfortable at it.  I don't think I did it enough ever to really become comfortable at it.  But then again, as a teacher, I have interviewed.  Now that I think more about it, every time I sit down with a student (and now a teacher in my role as a literacy coach) and have basically a substantive conversation, I am interviewing.  I may not have a guide in front of me but I usually am following some sort of mental framework in what I am talking about with a student or teacher.  As I've participated in such encounters more and more, I've tried to work on being a better active listener, listening more, in other words, and talking less.  This happens to all of us...someone is talking to us and our minds wander, thinking about what we need to do or where we need to go and in the end, we have not usually heard a word that the other person has said.

In this blog entry, I was going to write about the deMarrais chapter and how instructive and useful I thought it was and will be as I prepare for the data collection part of this project.  The chapter does have some great information about creating an interview guide along with what should happen as the interview process unfolds.  I particularly like the "dinner with a close friend" metaphor that the author uses to describe how a good interview should progress.  But as I was writing and thinking, the entry became more about how I do have some valuable experience interviewing already and it's experience that most of us who are teachers already have.  If we talk with our students in ways that make them comfortable yet provide us (and them) with valuable information, then we are already conducting successful interviews and only need to tweak what we do a bit in order to be successful in our interviewing as a part of our qualitative research projects!