Keep the School's Perspective in Mind Posted on March 1, 2006 Crystal Cullerton-Sen (bio) provides a doctoral student's perspective on working with public schools

Speaking from the side of the school's perspective, my interpretation of what I see is that teachers are often overburdened with the demands that are placed upon them from multiple levels. Schools are rated, their performance is rated, based on children's academic performance, so first I think what researchers have to keep in mind is that's their perspective. Their A#1 goal is to see that their children, students, achieve in an academic sense. In fact, they're being evaluated based on children's grades, their test score performance, and that's in the back of their head all the time.

I think keeping that in mind because as we go into schools and request to do research in their schools, if our goals and our questions aren't related to that achievement, it might be a hard sell. Because it's taking away academic time. It's taking away their prep time. It makes me think, I had said to a teacher once... I had asked, "Do you mind if we touch base during your prep hour?" and she laughed at me and she said, "Hour? Prep hour?" It's a 20-minute block that they might have to prepare a whole day's work or the next week's work.

I think keeping that in mind as researchers when we go in, and in fact, one of the panelists today, Todd Little and Bob Pianta also mentioned that, when you go in to talk to schools and tell them why your study's important, maybe you want to link it back to "You know we're studying aggression, but aggression can negatively impact children's engagement in school and their achievement." Link them that way. Get them on board that way.

Don't see schools as just a place to access the populations that you're interested in studying. They're not just the place that you can administer 120 questionnaires or 520 questionnaires. You're just not going to get very good data back. You have to form the relationships with the schools, and part of that is trying to understand what the schools are dealing with. Part of that is being flexible and not getting upset if you go to the teacher, and he or she hasn't had time to fill out the questionnaire. Ask maybe what's preventing it, and try to be flexible.

I think taking a proactive look at what kinds of questionnaires you're going to administer or what kinds of work you're going to administer and keeping in mind their time and really having a dialogue with the school beforehand. What are their main priorities? What's their time schedule like? Things like that. You're going to avoid a lot of obstacles, I think.

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