Memo 9 - Beginning Patterns and Trends

Memo 9 - Beginning Patterns and Trends  

After analyzing the data collected thus far, three major themes start to emerge for increasing positive student interactions. The major themes are: usage of foul language, personal distress, and perspective taking. Along with the major themes, emotions being used as currency seems to act as a mediator between empathy intervention and student relationships.

To begin coding I reorganized all my written and typed observations, student discourse, and interview statements into a table. I then reviewed the survey responses and determined the average empathy score for each empathy element: emotional concern, perspective taking, fantasy, and personal distress. Once everything was organized, I began to read through all the statements and survey results several times over. The first read was just to understand what I had in front of me. The second read was to start recognizing themes. As general themes started to pop up, I would write them down in booklet and include which source they came from. The hope was to see if the general themes could be triangulated. The third reading of all the sources was too look for patterns between those themes, when similarities emerged they would be highlighted the same color. This process was repeated several times, until the data was wrung dry. The next step I need to take is to organize patterns, trends, and similarities by theme. However, since I am a visible learner, I drew a diagram of how the themes could possibly connect to empathy interventions to student relationships. 

Along with writing down themes and highlighting patterns, I would also make note of questions or confusing ideas that started to arise. Question like, why are students comfortable with providing empathy in certain situations but not in others? For instance, why are my students comfortable providing empathy in times of crisis but not willing to discus empathy in hypothetical situations. I read my students the story the Giving Tree, and asked the students how they felt about the tree, some students said they felt bad for her while others said they didn’t care because it was story. But when a student comes to school crying that their friend has died, my students are able to provide their friend with support verbally and physically. Why do my student stop themselves from exploring a hypothetical situation? Are these situations trivial? These are areas I want to explore further as I gather more data, specifically in interview data.

So far, the data has shown that there is a connection between the use of explicit language, personal distress, and perspective taking on student relationships. The trends in the data strongly suggest that when explicit language decreases willingness to express empathy increases. This has been found in observations, student discourse and my teacher journal.  Also, a common trend found in interviews, student discourse, and observation is that students who are able to perspective take are more willing to express their empathy verbally. The last major trend seen in the data thus far is that students, at times, shy away from empathic moments because feelings of personal distress is uncomfortable.  

There is still loads of data to collect, explore, and analyze. While I take on this process I hope to find more trends that solidify my current finding but also explain them with a deeper meaning. Also, I hope to explore the pattern that suggest emotions are currency between students and act as a mediator to all other explained interactions.