Inquiry Tools Discoveries, Questionnaire, observation grid and field Journal

Using a questionnaire as a inquiry tool

After having now used a questionnaire in a more live manor. I have found it not as simple as sending an email, if you are wanting a specific audience to answer it. It can be time consuming and can require costs, if you are looking for a good response rate. It is not just about the questions.

If you want the email to be specific to a school or personal E.G You want to use the Head Teacher's name, then you need to send the emails separately or use automatic devise that changes the name in the email for you.  Getting a Head Teacher to answer it can be quite challenging because at times the admin staff could be answering it or it could be detected as junk mail. 

If you want the Head Teachers interest then you may need to research the school or send an invitation by post or even by hand. Head Teachers are often interested in the welfare of their students, so a competition aimed at their students may help, but then you may need to consider any ethics there. Schools are often looking for raffle prizes, so donating a raffle prize may increase your return rate.

Personally none of  the above are really within my budget, even creating and adapting a questionnaire into a direct mail could be costly. So after sending many questionnaires and only getting a couple or so in return, I decided to expand to include Deputy Head Teachers and Teachers. I also decided to use my professional network of teachers on Facebook. I sent the questionnaires individually rather than publically because I still wanted a good form of sampling. This I found more affective and less time consuming.  So building a professional network of acquaintances/friends on Facebook can be quite useful.

Using an Observation Grid and Field Journal.

I decided to use a Observation Grid and Field Journal slightly different, because being a Teacher Assistant I aim often observing.  I wanted a natural environment, so any questions related to the project I was teaching and not to my inquiry. The observation grid related to my teaching and delivery (because this is something I wanted to improve on), considering my inquiry project and leading to my specialism. I was the main participant and I wanted to improve my practice. I found the Observation Grid and field Journal helped me to reflect, thinking about the creativity and what was happening as well as some of the literature I had already read and previous experience.

The coding system I used which is an extension to the marking symbols we use at work, is something I could in future use to monitor how often a child was getting things right, engaged and making progress. This could help pick out a child that was coasting along or even be used as an assessment to compare to a test.  It is possible to put the results into a graph. The graph/assessment could support the progress a child is making if they underachieve in a test or a test doesn't demonstrate progress which could be caused by many reasons.

I think using an Observation Grid and Field Journal, is something I would recommend. This is something I will probably continue to develop using when doing a PGCE.