Combination Of The Two

Well, clearly I need to narrow down my focus or else I’ll be in a world of trouble when I got into the classroom for research. For now, to address Dr. Friedman’s comments, I view discussion, or at least the discussion I am thinking about, as full class interaction, not just the one on one interaction (not that this is not valuable in itself). For research methods, I think that there are several applicable ones. Interviews, which alone would fall into the qualitative category, would be very useful. It might be difficult to collect a sufficient number of interviews and observations to really complete a good study, though. A survey might be the best approach, at least initially. A Likert Scale would work very well in this situation. After compiling the data to learn how often teachers incorporate discussion into their lesson plans, I think it would be useful to try to learn why teachers do, or do not, use discussion as a tool in the classroom. This is where I could incorporate interviews. It would be interesting to talk to a few teachers on both ends of the spectrum (those who use it quite often versus those who seldom if ever use it) to see why. This way I could learn not only how frequently discussion is used, but often why teachers make these decisions. I know this is not refined enough, but I hope that this is closer to a good narrow topic…