NVivo training

Had the first session of NVivo training this week. I can see how useful it will be, but the laptop I was given spent an hour and a half updating and that meant that I couldn't do very much that was hands on.

I conducted two more lesson observations, two more teacher interviews and two more student focus group interviews on Friday, so data collection continues apace. Two participants are very accessible and the other two proving slightly trickier. The end of term looms ahead and I suspect that I will not be done.

Still, I do at least have plenty of data to work with, currently. It feels difficult to get on with it without knowing the full capacity of the software; but time to get to know my data is here.

Research Image Competition

I am enjoying a rare day at university, as part of the Festival of Doctoral Research where my photograph is shortlisted in the Research Image Competition - and so school have let me escape to receive the award.

My entry is entitled Fostering a Collaborative Reading Community and the accompanying text reads:

Teachers in a secondary school English department in Sussex use theoretical lenses on reading and current research with the aim of creating a long term shift in reading pedagogy in order to stop 'murdering the books' as represented here by the archway of texts. My doctoral research explores the way changes in reading teaching approaches may help foster collaborative reading practices in the classroom and enable secondary students at all levels to break through reading barriers; depicted here as smashing through the classroom ceiling.