12.6.10

I'm a little late on this post, with going to the East Coast for a week, I got really behind on everything.

I've been thinking a lot about my question and my research though. I keep have this vacilating feeling between my research being way too straightforward and sort of uninteresting, to my research feeling really amorphous and I'm not sure how to really look at the data. For instance, I've got all these coach rubrics, and I've been trying to dig into them and notice patterns and places for improvement. I've also got some mentor self-reported surveys from after their sessions where they kind of rate themselves. I've been working on cross-tabulating those to see where the areas of cross over are. BUT, my big thing is that these are all assessments right? Either self-assessments or coach assessments. I'm not looking at the actual data of sessions very often. Is that okay? I guess what feels weird is that I'm not collecting the data, I'm using data from someone else. But maybe that's alright? I don't have to do everything myself right?

So, I've got two thoughts on trajectory:
1. do mentors improve in their rubric grades?
2. If so, in what ways? If not, why not?

3. and then I guess there's sort of a third question in what mentors need and how we provide that type of support.

Maybe there's something I can start looking at once I have two or three rubrics for each of my focal students. Dig into what is happening and where are they continuing to struggle and where are they have really improved. Also, cross referencing those two data points with student surveys about how they think their mentor is doing.

So let's see, I'm going to pick some mentors for my focal group. My criteria for this are: students who are struggling, mentors who I think are struggling, and mentors who respond often to the survey or students who are somewhat disengaged.

Prenab-Sam
Helen-Jaci
Lynn-Caitlyn
Swapna-Sage
Chris T.-Justice/Seth