For your third assessment you will be designing your own inquiry project and community engagement plan. The assessment itself will focus primarily on the design of your project, rather than on you actually implementing your plan in your school context. However, it is hoped that you will then actually implement the plan in your practice.
Last week focused on the teaching as inquiry process, developing your understanding of what teaching as inquiry is, why it is important and how it actually looks in practice. This week is focused on outlining the steps and stages you will need to go through when developing your own inquiry project and community action plan for your third assignment. The format of the project you will be developing for assignment three is slightly adapted from that outlined last week.
A key element of your assignment is deciding how you will involve community (this could be students, other teachers in your school, whanau etc) in the planning and implementation of your project. Community involvement will include informing your community about your project, seeking feedback from your community about your project during the planning stages as well as throughout its implementation, and sharing the findings of your project with your community.
Steps and stages for developing your inquiry project
Topic area
The first thing you need to do is to clearly establish your topic area. This should be the topic, or a sub-set of the topic, that you have been focusing on throughout this course.
You will need to create the research question(s) that will guide your inquiry project. Think about what it is that you want to find out about. Try to be as specific as you can be.
You need to assess the relevance of your project and justify your decision for focusing on this topic. This should include:
- How the literature on your topic supports your area of focus
- Why your topic is particularly relevant to your school setting
- How your topic will support your community
Culturally responsive projects
It is important that you think about how you can ensure that your inquiry project will be culturally responsive to all learners, and for the assessment you will need to include a section discussion how it incorporates or responds to aspects of Kaupapa Maori and Te Noho Kotahitangi. The Ministry of Education has created a resource on Improving Outcomes for Maori and Pasifika Students through Inquiry that may be helpful. The document is available on the portal as well as from the Ministry website, which also provides other useful information (http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-stories/Case-studies/Teachers-as-learners-Inquiry).
Establish your community
You need to clearly identify the community or communities that you will be engaging with in your inquiry. Communities could include students, other teachers and school staff, whanau. You need to discuss why you have chosen to focus on this community and how your topic is relevant to them.
For your assessment you need to discuss at which stages of the inquiry project you will be engaging with your community and why. Here are some stages that you could engage with your community:
- designing the focus of your inquiry
- gaining initial feedback on the design of your inquiry
- the methods you will be using to collect data
- the data collection process
- the analysis of your data
- the presentation of your findings
Data collection methods
You need to think about what data you will need to collect in order to answer your research questions (next week focuses on data collection in more detail). This data can be either qualitative or quantitative, or a mixture of both. Some things to think about with regards to data collection:
- What baseline data do you need to collect? Baseline data is data collected at the start of an inquiry project that allows you establish the current situation and will enable a point of comparison for data you collect through out your inquiry.
- What data do you need to collect throughout your inquiry project? Do you need feedback from students? Do you need student achievement data? Think carefully about the best way to collect this data. It might be in the form of tests, surveys, focus groups, interviews, classroom observation, student portfolios of achievement.
- What summative data do you need to collect? This is data collected at the end of your inquiry project that will enable you to see what has worked and what has not worked.
For each data collection method you need to explain why you have chosen it, the data it will provide for you and why this data will be important.
You need to think about how and why you will be including your community in your data collection.
Next week will focus more specifically on the types of data you could collect and collection methods.
Seeking initial feedback
As part of your assessment you need to get initial feedback on your inquiry plan. This feedback could take a variety of forms. You may want to show your plan to your mentor/principal/HOD etc and ask them to provide feedback on it. You could engage with your community (students/teachers/whanau) and ask for their feedback on what you are proposing. While the way in which you collect this feedback is entirely up to you, for this type of feedback, it often is most helpful if it involves face-to-face discussions.
Responding to feedback
For your assessment you will need to document the feedback you received as well as discuss how you will respond to the feedback. It might involve the modification of some aspects of your inquiry project, for example slightly modified research questions or a different data collection method. You need to show evidence that you have reflected on the feedback you received.
Impact of findings
You will need to assess the potential impact of the findings from your inquiry project. While you will not know yet what the findings will show you, you do need to think about some of the ways in which they might impact on you, your community, your school etc.
Task for this week
- Read through the class notes.
- As part of your assessment 3 you will be asked to think about how the Teaching as Inquiry project you design will engage various communities in your school (i.e. students, teachers, whanau etc) as well as how it relates to Kaupapa Maori research. The following website discusses how teaching as inquiry can be designed so that it is culturally responsive to all students.http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/Curriculum-stories/Case-studies/Teachers-as-learners-Inquiry/Teaching-as-inquiry
- Start planning your own inquiry project.
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