Research Journal #1

My thoughts about the action research project…

To summarize where the weekend session left me, I have settled on an idea that not only interests me, but is also a “hot topic” in my department at OU. I expect some shared enthusiasm/support from professors. It is my intention to collect data about teachers who work in the same environment, but have different educational backgrounds. I would like to compare teachers with IB teacher awards to teachers of a different master’s program. It is important that the teachers have about the same amount of schooling in teacher prep programs. I got some help from Matt in class to identify some data collection plans that sound reasonable, but I have yet to get my research problem set in stone.

I am excited to work on the topic of teacher prep programs. It has been a topic of interest that I have both experience from my own time in the elementary education undergraduate program, as well as reading, as in the NCATE’s Blue Ribbon report, Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice: A National
Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers.

So, I intend to address the problem of “teacher preparation effectiveness” by investigating the pedagogical differences between teachers of different preparation, but working in the same professional environment. I need to identify which behaviors I will be looking for and may need to examine courses in each program
to do this. I have yet to determine how many teachers to study or where. I am super excited to go into work tomorrow and talk about this with TDES professors.