First, I'd like to say that this has been the best classroom experience thus far in the Special Education tract. I'd definitely continue to infuse the activities into the overall scope of each week's session. They really helped me wrap my brain around a lot of the concepts and objectives that would otherwise be difficult to explain and comprehend. A good example of this was the coding activity. That activity really helped me understand the aim and focus of what it means to be a qualitative researcher.
With that said, my opinion of research has definitely changed. I have found a great appreciation for the amount of work, dedication, planning, and effort that goes into developing a research question, finding related articles, attempting to add to that research, as well as answering the initial research problem. It's not easy, that's for sure.
As a special educator I am, by law, per IDEA, supposed to integrate research-driven and empirically proven methods to help educate my students. This class has helped and will continue to help me uncover these methods as well as discover their transferability and usable qualities for the education of this population. It has also helped my identify what research is "good" and what research is "bad".
While I really don't want to be a researcher or do any more research, I feel much better equipped to answer pertinent and nagging questions that surround the field of education. Research in this field is and will continue to be crucial as policy makers will continue to base decisions and changes upon the research. Therefore every decision I make as an educator will be based on previous research and any changes to the curriculum will also be reliant on new research. This class has definitely helped me understand and accept this relationship.
Thanks for the feedback. This is useful as I plan for the next semester. Although you said that you are not interested in being a researcher, I think that are some important way that you can integrate research into your practice as a teacher. Action research is one. From the beginning you have talked about how you approach your students as a researcher, experimenting with works for them. I think that what you have learned in this class could be added to your practice to make this an even more productive process.
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