Troublesome Words

I am finding writing tough.

Much tougher than I thought I would.

At the helpful suggestion of my supervisor I am tackling 'vignettes': short little hunches or observations; which is how I am managing to fool myself into undertaking small bits of data analysis that don't feel too 'I'm writing my doctorate' scary. 

The current vignette focuses on a process of 'misremembering' that I have observed repeatedly in the data. This is essentially to do with teachers absorbing, embedding and then embodying pedagogical ideas to the extent that they cannot recall not knowing the thing.

Yesterday I spent the whole day writing. I tucked myself away in Little Acorns and set to it. In the morning, I worked on some commercial non-fiction and wrote about 2,500 words in under three hours. In the afternoon I switched to the doctorate and barely squeezed out 500 in a longer time period. It is crushingly, numbingly hard to do. Especially in the wake of feedback on my first vignette - that was detailed, helpful and, well, stifling.

I feel as if every single sentence has to be checked and double checked for precision and accuracy in a way that doesn't happen with other forms of writing. There is no freedom just to write. And I have become obsessed with word counts. Just like my GCSE students, who ignore my claims that it is 'quality not quantity' that matters.

Tomorrow I shall be attempting blood from stones. It will be more productive. 

Grinding To A Halt

I was feeling good at the start of term, when the majority of the data was in and I felt 'on track'; but things have nearly ground to a halt now. Apparently that expression comes from the idea of an engine getting clogged up, or ship running aground, and it's apt because that is exactly how I feel.

I have uploaded most of my data to 'Dedoose' and played around with some preliminary coding, but not really in a consistent or systematic way. And apart from some half-hearted reading of loosely connected articles, I have done nothing in the last month.

I can blame: pressures of work, pressures of the part time work, other writing deadlines, my supervisor being absent for a couple of months with her own writing deadlines, doing a play last month, some extended periods of international travel....

I can console myself that this term is always difficult - after the luxury of summer to work uninterrupted for long periods. Looking back at this blog I can see that Autumn has repeatedly been a relatively unproductive time in the year.

Even so, I know that I am procrastinating, and worse, just blatantly avoiding, doing any work at all. I think my fear is that I must actually start writing, and I'm scared about doing that. I need to know what the structure is going to be, and - and this quite ridiculous - the university have just changed the website and software that we use to access materials and I haven't got my head around that yet. I'm feeling bad for not sorting something that should be relatively simple, and it's turned into a major barrier. 

This blogpost is acting as an admission of guilt. I'm just hoping it is enough to kickstart me doing something about it, and finding The Cure.

The Results Are In...

Sort of.

Summer, three years in to this messy thing. All my data, bar three classroom observations, is in (or should that be 'are in' if data is a plural noun? Sounds wrong!) and transcribed. So now I approach...data analysis.

I have researched web-based qualitative data analysis software and 'Dedoose' seems to be the most similar to NVivo, so I am planning to trial it for the next few weeks. Assuming that the software is successful, my next 'jobs' are:

1. Sign up and get to know the Dedoose application
2. Upload all data collected and transcribed so far.
3. Conduct the final three observations in September and add those.
4. Complete the first level of analysis
5. Begin condensing and reducing each code ready for writing up.

I have recently returned from a rare supervision with my second, much more brutal(!) supervisor.
"So, what have you found out so far?" was the opening gambit to our meeting. Gulp.
It's a good question. Not much, it seems.

• the transformative significance of the action seems to be related to the longitudinal nature of the research; participating teachers have been involved over two years
• teachers report increased confidence in pedagogy surrounding reading teaching
• teachers explicitly foreground the collaborative nature of the reading process in the classroom
• teachers function as advocates for the primacy of narrative
• teachers seem to have found more creative ways of conducting reading and inviting volunteers from the class to contribute to the reading process
• teachers spend more time in lessons on reading - reported and triangulated through observation
• teachers themselves are reading aloud more
• teachers are finding creative ways to represent the learning/reading
• teachers put engagement first and seem very articulate about how and why
• teachers are consciously creating a 'safe space' for reading to happen

Straightforward, and not setting the world alight. In addition there were some unexpected and less encouraging 'hunches':

• teachers are occasionally misinterpreting theoretical and pedagogical perspectives (but still applying these 'confidently' in the classroom)
• teachers don't seem to be doing what they 'say' they are doing

There's one blindingly obvious problem with these crude and unsubstantiated observations though: they all relate to the teachers. I seem to be preoccupied with the nexus between teachers' reading, knowledge and understanding, and the actual 'doing' in the classroom; and also the 'snowball' design of the research: how it seems to be folding-in at each stage; e.g. as teachers use the transcripts of the student interviews to further inform their thinking and practice. Where are the students in all this? They formed approximately a third of the original research design, but I'm not in a position to say anything very much about them at all.

I need to have a much closer think about the students...

What else would I do differently, having come this far? My experience of the observation process has certainly shifted; I might conduct the student interviews differently for richer discussion; my interview technique, particularly in relation to the student focus groups and the observation through transcription that I might inadvertently be shutting down potentially fruitful avenues of dialogue, so I'd watch out for that more than I have been.

Meanwhile, you will find me buried somewhere in a software tutorial.

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.

Epiphany Amongst the Tulips

This week, whilst on international duty with a school trip in the Netherlands, I am reading papers 91, 92 and 93. I wish now that I had catalogued them differently and distinguished between a book and a journal article, but it is a little late for that.

From out of nowhere, or rather from simply being next on the list, Paper 92 was Norman, J. Unrau & Matthew Quirk (2014) Reading Motivation and Reading Engagement: Clarifying Commingled Conceptions, Reading Psychology, 35:3,260-284; and, as the title suggests it focused on sorting out the tricky concepts of engagement and motivation which are fundamental to my study.

I think this would become one of my 'desert island papers' if I had to write this thing in splendid isolation, and feels like a moment of breakthrough in terms of defining these ideas. In a week where I should have been enjoying the cycling and the tulips and the stroop waffles, I was busy trying to articulate ideas in relation to the focus group interview questions and lesson observation schedules so that they could be more clearly tied to either engagement or motivation.

I enjoy these moments where writing and thinking are inescapable forces. Often, it seems, I am forcing myself to sit down and read or write something, but this paper seemed to force me, so that on my glorious morning cycling commute to work which took me along the Harderwijk waterfront, I was busy mentally composing sentences and revising questions which I had to commit to paper as soon as I arrived in school. 

Or perhaps it is simply travel broadening the mind! 

Easter Promise

My Easter holiday promise to myself has been a minimum of an hour a day working on the doctorate. It is day 10, and apart from Easter Day itself, I have managed this.

For the first week of the holiday this hour was mostly spent transcribing teacher interviews. I'm still waiting to get on an NVivo course at the university, so coding is tentative at this stage. I have made preliminary narrative notes on some of the data, and have identified some potential codes. This is in addition to themes which emerged from the first round of study group research interviews. It will therefore be a hybrid process of inductive and deductive thematic analysis to interpret the raw interview data.

We have agreed that the next supervision should involve a coding comparison, so I have sent two of the interviews to my supervisor.  I am looking forward to a rich discussion as a result.

There are a mounting pile of papers waiting to be read. They seem to grow exponentially. I finished reading and making notes on Willingham's The Reading Mind this afternoon. It always feels more satisfying to have worked through an entire book rather than a paper.

But, as ever, progress seems slow. Process seems painstaking. The sheer size of the undertaking requires that I am logical and organised. No more haphazard note taking and notebook scribbles a la the MA.  Shhh. And that makes things much more laborious. It will be worth it in the end. This time round I can more or less lay my hand on the quotation or idea that I am looking for.

The annual review also looms ahead. I know it is important, but as a part-time student with limited hours to give, it seems a tedious administrative task.

Financially, I am struggling a bit. Going part-time and relinquishing my responsibility means that the termly fees are harder than ever to find. I have applied for a small bursary externally. If successful then I will be required to deliver some related CPD in return. But since I seem to be doing this regularly that will be no great burden. Fingers crossed.