Last week I had two very productive discussions with team members about our qualitative data collection strategy. It’s fantastic to be able to rely on others who have more experience and knowledge about this than myself and Kathrine and Ola helped me – in one relatively short meeting – to get a much better handle on what it involves and how we can approach it.

They’ve put together a rough plan which should be really easy to implement this year. The key things I’ve learned in this process are:

– the need to gather data which is focused and specific

– finding ways to do that focusing isn’t as easy as I thought but can be effectively structured into the teaching and learning process – so it operates as a learning experience for the students as well as a data-gathering exercise for us.

The next big thing to tackle is the ethics side of things – something that I’m working on with another one of my  hats on: as chair of the school teaching and learning committee.

Cheryl and I have had a chance to talk through all of this and have come to some very helpful agreements. So – it’s back to google docs for us for some of that shared editing for which we are becoming (justly) famous.