Their insights about what students need, what they need to support their students’ social and emotional learning will be so beneficial to this work and to practice. In upcoming posts, I will summarize some of the key ideas that I’m finding from the interviews. But for this post, I think it’s essential to get a sense of the recruitment process and next steps.

Recruiting through social media

I have chosen to recruit through my networks on Facebook and Twitter. These networks are where I interact with teachers the most often. On each site, I posted the following:

Are you a Canadian elementary educator or administrator? Want to share your experience with Social & Emotional Learning? Visit https://t.co/hH9ITQRp9a.

Please share this study with your friends & family! We ask that you do not share through professional email.

#OntEd #SEL

Along with the recruitment posters

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• 

I shared the materials again on Friday, April 25th.

From the link in the materials, interested educators and administrators are taken to the recruitment page of the website. Here they can find more information about what is involved, why I am conducting focus groups and interviews, and register to take part in an interview.

Interviews and focus groups are then conducted online in a password protected Zoom conference room. You can check out the semi-structured interview protocol here: Protocol. A semi-structured protocol allows me to adjust the questions based on the experiences that the educator is sharing and follow up on relevant points. It’s flexible while providing a framework to work within to answer my research questions.

The momentum was strong to start. I received eight emails to set up interviews or ask for more information. From those, I have conducted five interviews and will be speaking with another educator tonight.

If you are curious about the engagement/shares that these posts received, take a look below.

Platform/Date	Shares	People Reached	Engagement
Facebook – April 17th, 2020	13	Unknown	Unknown
Facebook – April 25th, 2020	4	248	25
Twitter – April 17th, 2020	9	1610	81
Twitter – April 25th, 2020	5	684	41

Engagement can mean someone liked the post, opened a link, or viewed the photo.

Moving Forward

My next step with recruitment will be to try and recruit more educators and administrators from outside of Ontario. I will do this mostly by adjusting my hashtag on twitter to focus on educational hashtags for provinces outside of Ontario (e.g., #BCEd).

In the next few days, I will also start transcribing the interviews. Transcribing will allow me to start thinking through some of the themes and trends I see in their experiences. This is a long process, but I promise to keep you updated on my thinking as I work through this.

The scoping review

The scoping review is still underway! The new statistics about my progress can be found below. I am still working through the second round of title and abstract screening of all the articles I had initially been marked as “Maybe” or “Yes.” I hope to start uploading some full-texts for screening later this week.

The full-text screening process will require me to review each full article to determine its relevance to the research question, how do researchers in Canada conceptualize and enact social and emotional learning? Specifically, is there an active learning piece? Is the research conducted in Canada?

Screened articles	Flagged for second review	Irrelevant	Remaining
23638	269	23369	384

Next week, I will provide a little more background about Phase two. We will discuss the function of focus groups and interviews, the research questions related to this second phase, and how it relates to the first phase of the scoping review.

If you have any questions or would like more information, please feel free to email me at hwoods@uottawa.ca.

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