Mindlab Musings

The Data I Have Collected So Far: Babione (2014) talks of ‘the overwhelming overwhelming task of making sense of our data collection” (p1) and as far as I can tell he is not wrong! As teachers, we carry a lot of ‘data’ around in our heads, and the same is true for this inquiry. Much of the data is qualitative, that is, based on observations that I have made throughout the implementation of the inquiry. While designing our action plan, we identified the following data that we would use. We were able to collect the two key types of the data that we had originally intended to, however, the results and data from the survey were not useful. There were a number of reasons for this - and in the end, I decided against using this as a measure of progress. While it was discarded, it did not change the fact that it opened my eyes initially to the perceptions of the children in terms of how they perceive the roles of teachers and themselves. This could become my next inquiry! The rubric a...

Ethical Issue Identified: “It’s not fair!” As a teacher, my actions are guided by Our Code, Our Standards (Educational Council, 2017) and in our action plan, we gave special mention to the value pono - “showing integrity by acting in ways that are fair, honest, ethical and just.” Similarly, principle 2.4 of the Ethical Guidelines document mentions the need to be aware of those affected by research as well as those involved (NZARE, 2010). The critical comment “It’s not fair” came from students who were not part of my research group. They wanted to be involved. They had seen the original target group of students, meet with the teacher on a daily basis and being given the choice of working together or alone, using a digital device or not and felt left out and not as important as the targeted students. The beauty of 7 and 8-year-olds, is that they will call me out when they think that something is NOT FAIR. This is my ethical dilemma, competing interests of groups of students in my c...