After reading chapter five from The Reflective Educator's Guide to Classroom Research, I learned a lot about data analysis and what I should learn from collecting it. I learned that many teacher-inquirers move through four steps: description, sense making, interpretation, and implication drawing as they analyze their data. The goal of the descriptive step is to describe my inquiry data using the following questions: What did you see as you inquired? What was happening? What are your initial insights into the data? The next step is sense-making by reading my entire data set and asking questions such as: What sort of things are happening in my data? What do I notice? Then, I will begin the interpretive step of my inquiry analysis and ask questions like: What was my initial wondering and how do these patterns inform it? How are these patterns connected to my teaching and to my students? Finally, the last step is the most important step. I will start to reflect on implication questions such as: What have I learned about myself as a teacher? What have I learned about children? What are the implications of what I have learned for my teaching and what changes might I make in my practice? Last week in seminar, I started outlining my data collection. I have decided to collect the following:
a)  field notes to record observations of student behavior
b) teacher interviews to discuss classroom management
c) teacher reflective blog to assess my thinking of current classroom management and changes I might want to make
d) literature on classroom management to find the benefits of the use of classroom management plans
e) student surveys (before and after) to get the students opinions of their classroom behavior and what they will respond to

As I am collecting my data over the next couple weeks, I hope to keep the questions stated above as a reflection piece to see how I am doing with my data analysis. I guess what I am wondering now is whether we have to go through each of the "step" to successfully analyze our data?