Crossroads

Before I begin, I just want to take a quick minute to thank all of you who have posted comments to my blog.  Each and every one of you has made me keep analyzing my project… THANKS SO MUCH! J

When I met with my supervisor last week we briefly discussed an overview of my plan and hit the highlights.  I asked her if she wanted me to follow the first grade retained students through the TI and TII intervention levels or if she wanted me to follow the instruction, i.e.: the teachers, giving the TI and TII interventions.  After a deep breath she said, I don’t know… I think I’m going to leave that up to you.  Then we proceeded to discuss the positive and negative aspects of both options. 

I think she took a deep breath because she, like I, know that it is a delicate situation when you go and observe other teachers.  Some are open to it and others not so much.  Like I mentioned in my course posts, I will need to build trust and will be taking the advice of my colleagues to share my plans so that there is transparency in what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.  Key to all of this is to have an attitude of analyzing not judging; like a detective trying to solve a case.  The detective puts the pieces together but the attorney tries to place the blame so the jury does the judging. This will be hard for me and I hope to help myself by always attempting to stay neutral.  I hope to observe and record then compare and contrast what I’ve observed to research standards then presenting those differences to all involved.  This will still be a very delicate task so that I don’t come off negatively or in an elitist tone.     

I researched as much data as I could in the time allowed on our retained students as my supervisor wanted me to do before making my decision however the more I looked, and with each passing night, I just feel that following the students who’ve been retained would be to narrow of a focus.  I feel that the school would benefit more from looking at how teachers implement their interventions not just how certain students respond to those interventions.  Further, these students that have been retained might not need an intervention this year… one can hope!

We are meeting first thing tomorrow and will go through the plan in detail.  I am so excited!  I am going to ask her if I can follow the teachers since I think this will give us a greater understanding of the effectiveness of our interventions.  I think looking at just the retained population after we’ve studied the interventions will be a good secondary action study.  I can’t wait to hear what you all think.