The Joy of Listening

Today I finished my final individual interview for my research! Hooray!  

I was surprised (a little) at how much I enjoyed listening to teachers through the interview process.  I knew I would like it... I did design the study after all.  And getting the story straight from the voice of classroom teachers was the goal.  So it's not just that I liked it... it brought me JOY to be able to listen to teachers and acknowledge their feelings-good and bad. It brought me JOY to share genuine interest in the difficult and complicated and rewarding mission teachers have taken on to educate our children.  It brought me JOY to think that maybe, just maybe, by listening I can make a difference.

Now...I've got transcribing and coding to do!

Speaking and Writing-That's not how we do it!

I've spent hours and hours over the past couple of months transcribing audio recorded interviews with teachers.  It is tedious work and sometimes my mind wanders...though not for long as it's really not an activity that lends itself to multi-tasking.

I noticed that people do not speak in complete sentences, but rather in phrases.  Often, incomplete thoughts change mid-sentence.  We interject a whole lot of "uh"s, "um"s, and "you know"s.  Include lots of run-on sentences and forget about rules for punctuation completely.  Sometimes it is difficult to tell where one thought ends and the next begins.

When I was teaching children writing skills, I used to tell them to write down the words like they were telling me a story.  Boy, was that about the worst advice I have ever given.  How we speak and our expectations for formal writing, even storytelling, are worlds apart.  It's no wonder the task of writing is so difficult for students.  It's no wonder that we get short, simple, choppy sentences out of them!

I wonder what kind of a learning activity it would be to have students transcribe a short conversation?  I am guessing a multitude of mini lessons would follow!

Don't let compliments go to your head...

"Don’t let people’s compliments go to your head and don’t let their criticisms go to your heart."

I can't find the author of this quote, but I'd like to borrow it and apply it to data analysis.  It is important to celebrate successes you have measured through data collection.  But don't let it go to your head.  And let's face it, sometimes the truth hurts.  So as you are analyzing data, don't let disappointing results get you down.  Don't take data as criticism.

Data are meaningless until you do something with them; not once, but continuously.

They are everywhere?

 It just doesn't sound right does it?  One of my committee members would be coming out of her chair right now.  In my last post I wrote, "Data-It's Everywhere!"  But the word "data" is plural. And I know it. So I should have written, "Data-They're Everywhere!" Really? Really.  It doesn't sound right. 

I like to think of data as information we use to guide decision making.  Data are not just numbers. (See- plurally it just doesn't sound right! And I don't think plurally is a word either.) Data can be words or pictures or videos. Here's an example.  My husband told my older daughter that chicken nuggets at a specific fast food restaurant are made out of pigeon.  My younger daughter used her iPod to look it up and found that the restaurant [to be unnamed here] uses all white meat chicken in their nuggets.  But she also found that many nuggets contain a meat paste that is made up of all of the undesirable parts of the chicken.  Ok... I gagged a little just thinking about that.  She also found a video that showed what the meat paste looks like before they form it into nuggets, bread and deep fry it.  And that same kind of disgusting gunk is also how they make many hot dogs, bologna, salami and pepperoni.  Now these are some data to use in decision making. (Plural again...sounds funny.)

I considered posting a link to the video here, but if my 8 year old can find it, so can you! :)

In God We Trust

I am currently a "stay at home mom" and doctoral student at Purdue University.  Passionate about education, I have found myself lacking an outlet to SHARE that passion with others.  As I dig into research on collaborative data-driven decision making, my dissertation topic, and interview teachers for my own research, I need a place to collect and reflect.  Welcome to that place!

One of my all time favorite quotes on the topic: In God we trust.  Everyone else, bring data!  Thank you Doug Reeves!