Analysis of Powerful Teaching: A qualitative data gathering activity

Go with this now... it is a practice activity!

Getting started

Imagine that your school district has learned that you are taking a class in research methods and has hired you to conduct a little research study. Through a grant, the school district is trying to improve math and science teaching in the district and want you to conduct interviews of several "outstanding" math and science teachers. Your job will be to take notes on each teacher and then distill down by looking across your notes... several themes or important principles that capture the essence of "outstanding math and science teachers" - sound like fun?

Before you jump in with your observations... spend a few minutes imagining what you think you will see. What will these teachers be doing? What will their students be doing? What will curriculum and content look like in these classrooms? Now... here's the hard part... how will you keep from being blinded by your preconceived ideas about these teachers? In other words, how will you remain open-minded?

After you've spent some time thinking about these issues... proceed to the observation phase. Take a look at each video clip and be sure to jot down some notes while you watch. Between videos take a few minutes to collect your observations and begin looking for patterns across the examples. How do qualitative researchers know when they've gathered enough data? Well, when new data just seems to be adding to what you already know... then that's probably when you can stop.

Each of the nominated math and science teachers can be observed here:

• Elementary school math
• Elementary school science
• Middle school science
• High school math

Wrapping up

Upon completing the activity... you should have a short list or brief descriptions of what you believe powerful teaching looks like - at least looks like based on the data available to you! That's an important point here... that even though we're trying to view the world from inside a particular culture or context... we're still limited in what we can say to data that is grounded in that context! This is the essence of grounded theory research - that the data and the conclusions are grounded in the context or the examples we chose.

So... was this an easy/hard task? Comfortable/uncomfortable? Accurate/inaccurate? How about ethical issues - are there any here (assuming you actually got to observe in these classrooms)? How about given that the district wants to improve all math and science teaching based on your research? This is an issues of generalizeability... is it problemmatic? What caveats would you want to make sure accompany your research findings?

Hope this was fun!