Trial of instruments (Pilot studies)

To avoid distasteful surprises, De Vaus (cited in Nunes, et al., 2010) warns “Do not take the risk. Pilot first” (p73). This position suggests that the substantial advantage of conducting a pilot study is anticipating the debilities of the research project, namely controlling the adequacy of protocols, methods and instruments (Nunes, et al., 2010). Similarly, Teijlingen and Hundley (2001) offer a list of reasons for conducting pilot studies, amongst which are: developing and testing adequacy of research instruments; assessing the feasibility of a full scale study. Consequently, I carried out an initial trail of my instruments to test for the efficacy of the instruments and my intended research methods.

The initial trial of my instruments was conducted in a CoE in Greater Accra Region, and two primary schools in the Accra Metropolis also in Greater Accra Region (see Appendix 6 for timeline for data collection). The reasons for the choice of a CoE in Greater Accra Region, was that I had worked in that college as a monitor and therefore was very familiar with the terrain, the college was quite close to my office and therefore, I could commute easily on daily basis. Like the choice of a CoE in Greater Accra Region, the two schools in Accra Metropolis were also chosen because of proximity.

Six weeks prior to the conduct of the pilot phase, I visited the administrator of that CoE, district director of education, headteachers and UTs in the two basic schools, to obtain official permission and also to introduce myself, this time in a different capacity. On all these visits, after presenting the official letter, I took the advantage of the courtesy call to

brief these personalities on the conduct of the study, the purpose of the study, the periods that they will be engaged in the conduct of the pilot study, the extent of their involvement and the level of cooperation needed.

The following activities took place during this phase of the study: a focus group interview with 3 UTs, one classroom observation tutorial during residential face-to-face session, an interview with a member of a CoE management, one-on-one interview with 2 UTs on their perception on UTDBE and also on a videoed lesson from UTs classroom teaching. These activities are discussed in-depth later in this section.

Certainly, being familiar with the environment and some of the personalities involved and knowing how this could sometimes be of a disadvantage, I took advantage of the visit to explain my current status as a researcher. This preliminary personal visit was useful, in the sense that it helped to lessen my anxiety about collecting a data in familiar environment and from “familiar” persons, while at the same time offered opportunity to interact with UTs ‘break ice’, my principal actors of the study.

I spent three days in the CoE conducting the pilot interviews and observing classroom interaction between tutors and UTs. Since UTs were on residential face-to-face session, it was quite easy to get all the sampled UTs for the focus group interview during the first day of my visit. I did two activities in the second day. In the first part of the second day, I observed a classroom interaction between a tutor and UTs. In order to gain some

background and contextual information I also interviewed a management figure who had an in-depth awareness of teacher education practices.

During the focus group interview, all my 3 UTs willingly talked about why they wanted to be a teacher, their views about a good teacher, professional development and practice and why they enrolled on the UTDBE programme. One important issue that came up and therefore necessitated a change in my instruments was to combine the two separate questions on professional development and practice into one. This was because UTs when talking on professional development ended up talking about professional practice and vice versa.

Two weeks after the end of the residential face-to-face, I followed up with a visit to 2 UTs in their schools to interview them on the following: their perception about the UTDBE programme and a videoed lesson from UT’s classroom teaching. Two days were spent in each of the UTs school, with the first day devoted to interviewing them on their perception about the UTDBE and the second day dedicated to interviewing them on a their classroom teaching.

On the interview about their perception about UTDBE, the 2 UTs gave a good account of their experiences, highlighting the extent to which the programme has advanced their professional development as well as challenges. This suggested that the instrument related to UTs perception about UTDBE was appropriate and therefore did not need any revision.

My original plan was to monitor class teaching of UTs by me the researcher seated behind the class, listening and putting down my comments for discussion after the end of the lesson. During the initial discussion of this plan with my supervisor, I was advised to allow the UTs to video a lesson (class teaching), and later interview them on the good and challenging aspects of their lesson, using this video as a prompt for the discussion. However coming from a society where the normal approach to monitoring teachers’ classroom performance was to have the monitor seated at the back of the class and observe and take notes, I felt it was in good order and therefore went ahead with this approach.

During the lesson observation, I realised that the class was unusually quiet, with very few contributions from pupils. Questions thrown to the class were answered by a group of pupils with majority of them not showing eagerness to attempt to answer any question. This unusually quiet classroom behaviour of the pupils made me to suspect something, and so after the lesson, I managed to talk to some of the pupils to find out about the situation observed. One of the pupils told me in confidence that their teacher had cautioned them that in the presence of any visitor they should not attempt to answer a question if they were not sure of the answer. Any attempt at providing an answer that went wayward, such a pupil would be punished after the visitor had left. With this mind, I realised that I would not have a valid data if I went ahead to use this approach. I therefore decided to use videoed lessons of UTs classroom teaching as a basis for our conversation about their practice rather than be present as an observer myself.