Do you think of yourself as “just a teacher”? A lot of people do, certainly in England at any rate. And whenever I hear someone say that, in response to the question, “So what do you do?” I feel saddened.

I have always thought, and still think, of teaching as a very noble profession. If you think about it, you are influencing countless numbers of lives, in ways you will never know. Just one throwaway comment, and you could change a young person’s outlook forever, and he or she will pass that on to their children.

So far so airy-fairy, but there are more concrete ways in which a teacher can make a difference – apart from the act of teaching itself, I mean. One of those ways is by doing research.

I don’t know about you, but the word “research” makes me think of men in white lab coats, or of absent-minded professor types poring over fusty books in a library. However, working in a school affords lots of opportunities to do research, especially for the educational technology teacher.

All good research starts with a question, so here is a list of questions you might want to ask. If you’re a technology director or coordinator, you have even more scope to play around with these kinds of queries. Anyway, here goes.

Data-related Questions

I am always appalled by the lack of knowledge of basic data that many teachers seem to have. They say that charity begins at home, and in my book so does data-gathering. Here are the questions I would expect you – yes, you – to be able to answer were I inspecting your school.

1. What is the average ability in using and understanding educational technology when your pupils enter the school?
2. What is their average ability when they graduate from your school?
3. Was there an improvement? If so, how much of it was down to you and your co-workers, and how much down to the simple process of becoming more mature?
4. Is there a difference in attainment between girls and boys? If so, is it significant?
5. How have you been measuring attainment? Is it a valid and reliable method?
6. How many of your graduates go on to study information technology at university? How many get jobs in the IT industry?

I would regard these as the starting point, the bedrock if you will. Once you’ve got a handle on the basic data, all your other research findings will have a context. So, let’s move on.

Learning-related Questions

These are probably the ones that are of more interest to many people. Questions such as:

1. Could blogging help me to get the boys in my class to read more?
2. Could a social network like Library Thing help me to get the boys in my class to read more?
3. What’s the best way of getting my class to understand modelling?
4. How do other schools in my district teach subjects like data protection and copyright?

Methodology

There are many other kinds of questions you could ask, but I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about how you might approach your research project. It’s always good to have what the professionals call a “control group”, that is, a group you leave untouched so as to have a basis for comparison. For example, if you wanted to see if a social network could encourage boys to read more, you’d have to introduce one group of boys to it, but leave a similar group of boys as they are.

Your control group could come from within the school, or you could buddy up with someone from another school. You’d need to get some before and after statistics, of course. A good way of doing so would be to set up a survey for students to take beforehand, and afterwards. One tool is PollDaddy. I have never used it myself, but it seems to be quite popular, especially amongst users of Twitter, the micro-blogging application.

A really big advantage of using an application for this, rather than a printed sheet, is that you will be able to put the data into a spreadsheet and play around with it. For example, you may discover that tall boys who have orange juice for breakfast are the most avid readers by the end of the research period. OK, I’m being a bit flippant, but you can see my point.

Something you have to watch out for is that people tend to give answers they think you want to hear. With this in mind, you may want to disguise the true purpose of the questionnaire by inserting items that are not especially relevant, or not directly so.

For example, you may want to throw in questions about how much TV they watch, their favourite bands and so on, so that the question “How many books have you read this month?” does not especially stand out.

Why Bother?

There are good reasons to undertake this kind of research. For example:

• If you undertake it and write it up properly it might perhaps be able to be used towards a formal qualification of some kind.
• It can help you and your colleagues to get to know your students even better.
• It may assist you to find ways of more effectively teaching a very difficult topic, or a difficult class.
• It will help you to evaluate software applications and where they would best be employed.
• You may be able to write up your findings in the form of an article for a magazine or Web site. For example, I often run surveys on my Web site, and a recent one I conducted, about how teens use social networking sites, led to two speaking engagements, an article for my website, an article for my newsletter, and articles elsewhere.

Conclusion

In your position there’s a lot of scope for gathering some highly interesting information from which many people can benefit. What a fantastic position to be in!

Terry Freedman is a U.K.-based education technology consultant and publishes the ICT in Education website at www.ictineducation.org, and the electronic newsletter “Computers in Classrooms

Comments (4)

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Research
written by Terry, October 23, 2008

Thanks, Jaye
What was your research on, and where and when will you be sharing it?

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teachers as researchers
written by jaye richards, October 05, 2008

I absolutely agree with your post - our classroom practice gives us so much scope for action and design-based research. I've just completed the first phase of such a project on ICT and raising attainment myself, and it would be great to see many many more teachers doing the same. Time of course is a factor, as is funding, but there are ways and means....

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Serving
written by Terry Freedman, September 29, 2008

I agree, Dominique. I think teaching is still very much a vocation. Actually, in the UK at least, it's not too badly paid these days either .

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...
written by Dominique Ivy A. Calixterio, September 27, 2008

Well, I also feel sad whenever people would say.. Teacher? What will you get from teaching, you wont be rich in teaching. And I feel so deprived by what the people think for those teacher who were giving everything just to serve.

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