Getting Access to Schools Takes Time Posted on February 15, 2006 Robert C. Pianta (bio) talks about need to plan ahead when recruiting teachers from public schools.

Doing the kind of work we do in schools requires a level of planning ahead. We were very interested in trying to work with the public pre-kindergarten programs all across the state of Virginia to try to provide teacher training across the state.

One way we could have done that would have been to directly try to recruit teachers into the study, but as anyone who has done work in schools knows, as soon as you ask a teacher if they'd like to be in a study, the first thing the teacher tells you is 'I'd like to talk to my principal,' and then the principal says, 'I have to talk to my supervisor,' so the way we did that was to start two years ahead of the time we planned to launch the study. This was a complicated study, and it was an intervention study, so you need to work even more carefully to make sure that your interventions are sensitive to the kinds of things that the schools want to have happen, but we started two years ahead of time with the state coordinator of the programs that we were involved with. That state coordinator then gave us access in two directions. She worked with the state superintendent of schools to get permission to work across the state in these programs, and then the state-level coordinator provided us access to district-level coordinators, who then provided us access to principals, who then provided us access to teachers.

Any time you work in schools it is a very multi-layered system, and any person that you want to work with in that layer, and most of the time we want to work with teachers, we have to involve everybody in some level in the discussion and the planning of what's going on.

It can get very tedious to do that both from a time perspective; it just takes a lot of time, but also you have to be careful to have in mind very clearly the plans you have for the research you want to do so that you can communicate that to essentially what is a lay audience, and they need to understand the value of what you're doing. If you don't do that, if the researcher were to go in too late, sort of at the end of the game, or without adequate planning in the sense of clarity of what it is they want to do, very often times they get turned down.

A lot of times, researchers end up calling schools resistant to doing research, but I'm not sure they're resistant. They'd like to be partners as long as we respect the pacing and the procedures that they need to go through and the need for justification for what we're going to do. They're in a complicated business. We need to respect that and be very clear about what we're doing when we go in there.

« Back to Article