Collecting Data

Wow. I cannot believe that I am at the next step in my dissertation. It seems almost surreal and kind of anti-climatic. Not to overshadow the awesomeness of this feat and all of the wonderful retweets, reposts, and forwards that happened almost immediately after I sent out my invitation email… it’s participation. For some reason I expected “hundreds” to self-identify and participate on first sight of my invitation??? Hmm… this is a poor expectation. It’s about patience and the will to promote.

Of course, I opted to sample teachers in the province instead of a particular group, school, or school district. How does one sample teachers within the province? The “Vital Sassoon” effect… she has two, and he has two friends, and so on and so on and so on. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I am happy to use social media and email to convenience sample teachers who may satisfy my participant profile of a non-mathematics subject specialist teacher. Yup. It is somewhat ambitious.

Worst of all, I have no idea what the population of non-mathematics subject specialist teachers there are who are teaching or who have taught at least one secondary mathematics class in BC schools. This statistic is not recorded or published. Based on my experience as a secondary mathematics teacher in BC school, I imagined as a researcher that this number to be relatively high. I am not referring to any list to acquire participants to for this study and participants must self-identify as non-math specialists. Moreover, this study is limited to those who get access to the study.

Here’s the crazy part… this process is just to get the survey to the desired participant. The survey is about the PROFESSIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCES of these teachers and how they strengthened their knowledge of mathematics as a practicing secondary mathematics teacher in BC schools. Does this sound appealing to you? I’m totally stoked by this. It took me years to narrow my study down to one research question coupled with two sub-questions asking about the effectiveness of the learning activity and if the learning experience improved their teaching practice.

I love being curious. This is my motivation. My purpose is “to enhance the learning experiences of others.” And, my passion is teaching and learning… aka. Education. I don’t think that I am different from many others in the field of education but I am such an edu-junkie. I am always wondering about professional learning as a learner and teacher. I have great hopes for participation. Wouldn’t it be great to figure out what teachers like in terms of learning mathematics? I guess we’ll soon see.

This is only the first day of data collection with 13 more days to go. Truth, I got super excited when I got my first participant within the first few minutes of posting the email invitation on the BCAMT Listserve. A small part of me wanted the rate of participation to maintain itself throughout the day. Again, a poor expectation… but I do hope that there are lots of teachers “out there” who are compelled to tell me (anonymously) about their professional learning experiences. Come on… it sounds like a great way to spend 5 to 20 minutes of your time to contribute to research.

For more information about my study or if you’d like to participate or refer the study to a colleague, go to my webpage www.christineyounghusband.com/research.