Week 8: Reflection

Reflect on how you feel about your proposed methods, based on the feedback on your portfolio from the class.

I had thought that I might try to do a mixed methods approach to include surveys, interviews and observations of librarians, administrators and teachers. The basic problem that my research is trying to focus on is the ability for  librarians to expose teachers to the different opportunities of resources that are already in place but not used to their full extent. The thought is to expose teachers all these different opportunities for the core/tested subjects including math, reading, science, and social studies in the middle grades. With these approaches to the technology students can showcase what they have learned in different ways. This is important because since librarians have become the on campus technology go-to-people this would help them access where professional developments might be necessary and how they can approach teachers specifically for the departments they work with. A lot of the time programs/ and professional development are introduced in an overview format that does give specifics to its use in the different subjects. This can leave teachers without the guidance they need to implement it in their instruction.  After some thought, I narrowed it down to just working with teachers the information gathered would still be important to librarians as they create an approach to assist their teachers and to administrators so that they understand the tools that can be utilized and their abilities when considering scores and skills of students after benchmarks and other test administrations. The use of the products I wanted to focus on would be those that are similar for all ESC 1 districts so the survey could be extended to any one of the 38 schools districts that participate in the ESC 1 Library Co op. Since this research lends it self well to quantitative data, I wanted to focus on just the surveys that would include closed ended questions. Later I may decide to do interviews to those that had similar ideas just to gather quotes and get a feel for the thought behind their responses. In the end the data can be used by the librarians as a whole or split up again by district. I would like to focus on school districts with the more similar student populations, those that might be considered mirroring my own district which would be would economically disadvantaged. Selecting campuses who students percent of free or reduced lunch is 80% or more (The middle school I work at being at 88% of the students receiving free lunch.) The information would be according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 

A student from a household with an income at or below 130 percent of the poverty income threshold is eligible for free lunch. A student from a household with an income between 130 percent and up to 185 percent of the poverty threshold is eligible for reduced price lunch.

Of the middle schools chosen all core teachers of the 4 tested subjects will get the survey and I am hoping to get back a similar number to cover all the subjects and grades. For each subject the survey will be a bit different. The survey will include video for the teacher to watch to make them aware of the resources and the features and then they will be given the opportunity respond to questions that ask things like if they were aware of the tool, have they used it before, do they know that this was available through the tools, is this something that they might include in their class.