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Practitioner Research Group Analysis

Decent Essays

An Analysis of the Reading “Teachers as Architects of Transformation: The Change Process of an Elementary-School Teacher in a Practitioner Research Group” By Amy Vetter.

What type of qualitative research does this article represent? Why?
This article represents a focus group type of qualitative research. According to Qualitative Research Consultants Association (2015), in focus group qualitative research, a group of individuals who share a need, life circumstance, or habit relevant to the research issue(s) at hand are led in a discussion by a modulator. The focus group discussions often include between two to ten respondents, and are often held face to face. They can also be conducted remotely through videoconferencing, teleconferencing, or …show more content…

Grace, who was the main participant of interest, was heavily involved in the TTR group and was extremely reflective about her research process, and these were the reasons why she was chosen (Vetter, 2012). Melissa, Holly, and Gail on the other hand were practitioners in K-12 public schools and/or postsecondary education and all graduate students at the university (Vetter, 2012). The facilitator, who was also a participant, was also a practitioner. They were therefore correctly selected out of convenience, which is justified because focus groups are usually small and therefore, it is necessary for the researcher to select participants who are in the best position possible to give the right information, which may be impossible for randomly selected …show more content…

Grace was the main participant and therefore the researcher mainly focused on second year to examine her change process. Data to examine the process was collected from the TTR meetings from several sources, which included: Ten audio-taped discussions of the monthly meetings, three audio-taped group interviews, a conference presentation in the form of a power point, draft of a manuscript written about her second study, and observations and field notes from the ten monthly meetings. All these combined were sufficient enough to analyze and determine the change process (Vetter, 2012). The researcher also read and reread the various field notes, artifacts, and transcripts that involved Grace over several months to help add more insight into Grace’s change process.
However, the fact that the study only focused on a small group (a specific university students), a specific race (whites), one specific social class (middle class), and one gender (female) makes the credibility of the findings questionable because we cannot use them to develop a general conclusion to represent all the teachers. The researcher also acknowledged this by stating that the findings from the study can be used to inform other groups, but is not meant to be representative of all teacher researcher groups (Vetter,

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