Friday, April 17, 2015

Blog #10: Successes

This week, I am mostly feeling success!  I feel good about my survey questions, I was able to enter them into a Google Form and figure out how to send it to the teachers identified by my media specialist, and I am now having fun watching the responses roll in.  As of this writing, I have 18 respondents.   Out of the 44 teachers to whom I sent the survey, that is a 40% response rate.   Pretty good, right?  I did set a deadline of next Wednesday, so I may get a few more trickling in early next week, but most likely by then many of the non-respondents will have forgotten about it.  Even if this is it, though, I feel like it is a good sample size for a pilot study.  I am very grateful to my colleagues for taking the time to help me out.

As I briefly glance over the results, I am feeling glad I asked a combination of multiple-choice and short essay questions.  It is so interesting to read the longer answers.  I am already noticing some preliminary patterns.  The word "time, " for instance, appears far more frequently than any other word.  This is not surprising and seems to confirm the studies I cited in my lit review.  At the same time, it is surprising to see the diversity of responses.  How teachers perceive the role of the school media specialist is quite different depending upon the individual.  And answers are all over the board about whether our administration explicitly supports SLMS-teacher collaboration.  I never would have guessed this.

Of course, my feelings of success will surely dissipate as I start to try to make real sense out of all of this data.  My next step, after the survey closes next Wednesday, will be to try to input my data in NVivo and start coding.  I know that will be a major learning curve for me, and next week I probably will be writing about challenges, issues, and concerns instead of successes. But for now, I'm feeling good!

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