Mentors, February

1. Mentors, February Dr. Carol Gilles, University of Missouri

2. Things to consider • Syllabi done! • Different speeds • What is coding? Count (survey) “Notice and name” Transcripts (look closely at language) Larger chunks of text to code Looking at the whole to make a determination

3. Look at the next slide What theme can you identify in each comment? Are some comments easier to ‘name’ than others? On the slide following the first, you’ll see how the themes and counting were inserted into a paper.

6. Cooking Your Notes On the next slide, we see that the researcher has made a list of what her students say they do when they are stuck. She “cooks her notes” by writing comments to the right of the list. This gives her an opportunity to further categorize her list. This is only one way of “cooking your notes.”

8. Using Transcripted Data Remember not to transcribe everything! Listen to your tapes/videos and take notes, then transcribe what you need for your paper. In the next example, the researcher was trying to examine his own talk with students in a conference. The book read, was “Lily and her Purple Plastic Purse.” Notice that the researcher is looking at open versus closed questions and their effects on a child.

10. Overlapping codes The next slide shows how larger chunks of text (whether transcripts, written products or work samples) can be coded (or named) and that sometimes these codes overlap. That is quite common.

12. Tying Codes to Theory In the next slide you see how a researcher coded the students’ talk. Students were in book clubs and meeting without the teacher. She was trying to see the process they used to get deeper and became more critical. She figured out that they moved between being more abstract and then dipping in for an example, to be more concrete

13. Tying Codes to Theory . This movement back and forth from concrete to abstract is S.I. Hayakawa’s “Ladders of Abstraction.” If the researcher used this in the paper, then he would certainly mention S.I. Hayakawa’s work.

15. Using the entire work for themes The following two slides give you an example of a short lesson from a teacher who is working on involving the students more and talking less. Look at the next slide. What do you notice? Who talks more? What kind of questions are asked? Who has control of the situation?

17. Using the entire work for themes Now look at the next slide, which occurred a bout three months later. What do you notice? Who talks more now? What kind of questions are asked? Who controls the conversation? What does this mean?

19. Your turn Do some independent coding. Count, look for themes, “notice and name,” etc. Meet with a partner See how your coding is like/not like your partner’s What does that mean?