Empowering Social Change: Small Steps, Big Impact in Education
As a Walden doctoral student, social change is the ability to help the community in a small but meaningful way that enables others to continue that social change into a more significant occurrence. The Scholar of Change videos from Isaac (2014) and Kundert ( 2012). They were the most beneficial in helping to understand that my intended capstone does not need to be a considerable undertaking that changes an entire school system. Still, it can be a positive change that changes a school, a classroom, teachers, and students. The hope is the transferability of my study and the positive impact it will have on others.
Qualitative Reflection
I enjoyed coding and finding categories and themes from the literature, interviews, and videos. I need to learn more about the methodology and how to align the methodology with the problem and qualitative research questions. Dr. Pezalla (2016) discussed how this course gave us broad strokes for qualitative research. These broad strokes give us the basic information on conducting qualitative research; however, to be successful, there will need to be more practice with all the parts of the research process.
Reflection on Future Research
My problem statement is the low literacy achievement rates of low socioeconomic middle school students. With a focus on the lowest achievement rates being the African American male middle school students. The research will focus on teachers’ perspectives on this low literacy rate. This will be a qualitative study that will begin with a questionnaire to all the staff in the local middle school. I hope to form focus groups with teachers in all subjects from the questionnaire. Then I will conduct individual interviews. After coding the research materials for common codes and categories. The emerging themes will focus on a year-long monthly professional development to provide the tools the teachers need to succeed in helping students improve their literacy achievement.