Group reflection
Before...
When we first started on this project, we developed our own perspectives and points on what we thought would be some factors that would affect Professional Development in our chosen centre; Budget, Manpower, and Willingness. With those points that we had in mind, we crafted out our interview questions according to accordingly. We then interviewed the principal who had over 25 years of experience. We then went on to analyze her responses and attempted to identify the needs of the centre. However, we soon found ourselves stuck as we could not identify a need that relates to our selected topic; Professional Development. After receiving guidance from our lecturers and peers, we realized that we should not have conducted the interview with set perspectives to frame our interview questions but should have conducted the interview flexibly to gain as much information as possible on the centre’s perspective on Professional Development.
After...
After re-analyzing and sorting the interview transcript with an open mind, we found that the Principal mentioned multiple points on her view of Professional Development in the centre. With these findings, we found our needs for the centre which was to have novice teachers entering the centre to have aligned perspectives. With this need as our focus, we started planning for our recommendations on how we can help the centre counter this issue.
Therefore...
From this experience, we realised that when we want to conduct an interview to find out more about a certain topic, we should not have a set of perspectives already in mind. Having some ideas and asking on those ideas can help to craft the questions for the interview but conducting the interview with an open mind would help us to gain more information from the interviewee and lead to us having a broader perspective on our topic.