Initial Reflections on my Discussions with Educators

Published by Heather Woods on

This past week and a bit have been filled with fantastic conversations with educators from Ontario and Alberta, which leads me to think about common themes to unpack and my next steps for recruitment. This week, I’ll give you an overview of where things are and my thinking about Phase 2 and then give you a quick update on Phase 1.

Phase 2

I’ve been so fortunate to speak with 8 Ontario educators and 2 Alberta educators. Initially, my goal was to talk to 8-10 educators. Keeping this in mind and wanting to ensure equal representation between these two provinces, I will be looking to recruit around five more educators from within Alberta.

What ideas are jumping out to me

I have started to transcribe the interviews (2 done so far). While listening, I’ve been jotting down some big ideas that I want to unpack a little more. In initially thinking about them, they aren’t new ideas or strategies that teachers are using. However, what I think will be important moving forward in the research is breaking down how educators are implementing these strategies and talking about these ideas.

These ideas include:

  • Getting to know your students; overall and daily
  • Student voice/agency
  • The importance of reflection
  • Modelling social skills
  • Community

Once all the transcripts are completed, and I’m able to delve into each interview, and I will be able to explore further the context within which these themes are discussed and how they are implemented. I’m excited to share these preliminary findings as things continue to move forward. Each week, I imagine being able to share more.

Phase 1

Just a quick update on Phase 1. I am currently screening full-text articles for my scoping review. This process is indeed taking more time, so things are moving slowly, but they are moving. Firstly, after a discussion with my supervisor, we have opted to focus on research conducted from 1994 to the present. This was done to focus on the timeframe where Social and Emotional Learning was developed as a construct to be explored in depth by CASEL in schools (Weissberg, Durlak, Domitrovich, & Gullotta, 2015). This timeframe allows for the exploration of the history and evolution of research on the implementation of SEL over, roughly, 25 years.

At this point, I have been able to screen out some of the articles that did not meet the inclusion criteria of being Canadian or were not targeted at elementary settings. This information was not included in the title or abstract, so it is being rejected at this stage. Below, you can find the current numbers on my progress with the scoping review.

Screened articles TI/ABIrrelevantFlagged for Full-Text ScreeningFull-Text ScreenedExcludedFull-Text RemainingArticles for Analysis
248732364038247433354

Next Steps

At this point, I will continue to recruit elementary educators from Alberta through Twitter. I am hoping to have all current transcripts completed by the end of next week so that I can start exploring them more in-depth.

For the scoping review, I will be continuing to review the full-text articles and determining whether they meet the inclusion criteria. I think the biggest one that I will need to remind myself of is that I’m particularly interested in the implementation of Social and Emotional Learning.

Feel free to share your thoughts about emerging themes or the research in general. I would love to hear from you!

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

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