Internship report

June August 2013, Apczai Csere Jnos Highschool in Cluj, Romania

Mrta Darvasi email: marta.darvasi@student.oulu.fi University of Oulu

Contents
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 2 Motivation ........................................................................................................................................ 2 Context ............................................................................................................................................. 2 Tasks and activities .............................................................................................................................. 3 Student satisfaction survey .............................................................................................................. 4 Creating the questionnaire .......................................................................................................... 5 Gathering data ............................................................................................................................. 6 Analyzing data .............................................................................................................................. 6 Reporting results .......................................................................................................................... 8 Counseling of failed students........................................................................................................... 8 Updating the school website ........................................................................................................... 9 Graduation card database ............................................................................................................. 10 Learning goals and attained competencies ....................................................................................... 10 Follow-up and evaluation .................................................................................................................. 12

Introduction
At the end of the first year of my masters studies in the Learning, Education and Technology program at the University of Oulu I had the opportunity to do an internship funded by the university. I chose to complete a 10 week internship at the Apczai Csere Jnos Highschool in Cluj, Romania.

Motivation
I was searching for an opportunity to practice what Ive learned during the first year of my masters studies for a while before I thought of applying for an internship. The first year of the master program has been intense, both from the point of view of developing professionally and personally. I developed a thorough knowledge of theoretical concepts related to learning and educational technologies, and I had an idea of how they could be applied in practice. I also gained enough confidence to realize that I could be an asset to an organization in finding solutions to education related problems. This internship provided me with the opportunity to practice my newly acquired skills and gain more experience in acting as an expert in learning and educational technology.

Context
Apczai Csere Jnos Highschool in Cluj, Romania seemed to be the perfect choice for my internship for several reasons. The school was looking for someone to bring fresh new ideas to the school, someone who could help offer ideas to help the school run more effectively. They were also looking for someone flexible, who is able to help out in many different smaller tasks over the summer. The exact tasks would be decided upon arrival together with the school principle who would also act as my supervisor. I thought that the fact that they were expecting original ideas and active input from a trainee was very appealing and would allow me to grow professionally more than in the case of completing only a fixed task. Besides, Apczai Csere Jnos Highschool is one of the schools in Cluj having Hungarian as the language of instruction. I reckoned that having the same mother tongue as most of the staff and the students would allow me to gain a deeper understanding of the situation of the school in a shorter time.

1 Apczai Csere Jnos Elmleti Lceum/ Liceul Teoretic Apczai Csere Jnos/ Apczai Csere Jnos High School

Tasks and activities

The first day after I arrived I had an appointment with the headmaster to discuss my main tasks. For this meeting I prepared a list with my own suggestions about what tasks I thought could be potentially useful for both the school and my learning, based on our studies. The headmaster found most of my ideas useful and valuable, and added a few tasks that needed to be done for the school. Based on this discussion, my main tasks were set to be: creating a student satisfaction survey, gathering their ideas about how to improve it, analyzing the results of this updating the school website to reflect current conditions and to include current students products counseling students who failed from some subject together with the school psychologist, focusing on improving their SRL skills, helping them plan and reflect helping in planning and supervising a camp creating a support material for teachers about the Smart Board the school has, focusing on situations where it could be used collecting and scanning "graduation cards" from previous generations

I made a preliminary schedule that would help me keep track of all the tasks and would help me complete them in time. The agreement was that I would be working 35 hours per week, and write a weekly report on my blog (http://lettin.wordpress.com/) about my progress. 3

Preliminary schedule

During the internship, the preliminary schedule had to be changed due to various factors, and some tasks had to be abandoned altogether, while others gained a higher priority. The camp planning was abandoned because the planning team had already completed the planning process earlier, and although they welcomed me to the camp, together with the school we decided that it would be more useful to spend that time working on the student satisfaction survey. The other task that was not completed was the smart board assessment. Although I was looking forward to this task, when week 32 came, it turned out that the smart board is deeply hidden in some storage room. Even if it was possible to bring it up, it wouldnt have a constant place in any classroom. The school management decided that they cannot guarantee that the students would be able to take care of it, and the only locked computer room didnt have enough space to accommodate it. This was the school decision that I was unable to appeal. However, having less tasks meant that ultimately I had more time and energy to focus on the other ones, which are described in detail below.

Student satisfaction survey

Student satisfaction survey related activities filled out most of my time during my internship. The idea of doing a student satisfaction survey seemed like the best way to better understand the situation in the school from the student perspective, which is required in order to solve any problems. The school directorate supported this task strongly, as they have never conducted any similar survey; the results were expected by the whole staff. We were hoping that the combination of me being an outsider, but reporting to the school (and not some outside/governmental institution) makes the students more likely to be honest.

There were four main stages of completing the student satisfaction survey: creating the questionnaire, gathering responses, analyzing data and writing the report. Creating the questionnaire This step had to be completed fast, as from the moment of my arrival I had only three weeks until the students would leave on summer holiday. The questionnaire aimed to gather feedback from the students about the school in general, shed some light on their attitude towards the teachers and the institution and gather their ideas about how to improve it. I decided to include both open-ended and closed questions in the questionnaire. The closed questions were presented using a likert scale, where students had to rate how much they agree/disagree with some statements that can be organized in the following categories.

Counseling and protection of youth, containing items such as: If I need, I know where to find help; I'm satisfied with the career orientation activities at the school, etc. teaching and learning, with the following sub-categories: organizing learning, differentiated teaching, motivation for learning organization of the institution: I'm satisfied with the extra-curricular activities/with the school rules/sport opportunities/student union/etc physical school environment and equipment: cleanliness of school, level of library/computers general attitude towards school: I feel good in this school; I'm proud to go to this school; All in all I'm satisfied with what the school offers

The open-ended questions were mainly to find out students' suggestions for improving certain aspects of teaching and to reveal what they perceived as the school's/lessons' weaknesses.

I constructed the questionnaire on my own after having done some research beforehand, looking up similar surveys and adapting them to this school's context. The questionnaire went through several rounds of checking and modifying with the headmaster, but unfortunately there was no time for a pilot study. Gathering data I gathered data from 216 students, that is 84% from all 9-11th grade students. I was giving out the questionnaires myself to a whole class at once. This way the students could ask me questions, if something was not clear. Filling them out took around 25 minutes, and the rest of the lesson I spent discussing with students. They seemed to have a positive attitude towards the survey, and they were happy to see that the school was interested in their opinion Analyzing data The only way to get the answers to the question was by giving it out to the students on paper. This meant that I had to introduce all the data manually to SPSS. The first step was to define the variables in SPSS that I will need to introduce, it turned out that there are 106 of them, as each statement with a likert-scale answer is a separate variable. I also included two questions where students needed to rank certain things, and there all the items needed to become separate variables. Next time I will assemble a questionnaire I will take much more care in assessing how many and what kind of questions I include.

I learnt a lot during this process about doing quantitative research. I realized how much better it would have been if I had time to do a pilot study before to test the reliability and validity of the questionnaire. I checked the internal consistency reliability by calculating the alpha coefficient for some parts of the questionnaire. I discovered that one item was causing that part of the test not 6

to be reliable. In that item I was using a word that I thought was easily understood by all, but already when the students were filling it out they were asking me what it meant. When I removed that item, the the internal consistency reliability was much higher. I think in the future I will be much more careful in administering questionnaires; I will test the instrument I'm using properly, with at least two pilot tests. I did two main types of analysis with the quantitative data: I calculated frequencies, medians and standard deviation for most items, and I also did cluster analysis to see what kind of "student profiles" appear based on different variables.

Usually in every case students were divided in two groups, roughly half and half: one group thought that teachers noticed their efforts and that the teachers had good teaching methods. These students also thought that they had a chance to express their opinion and that the school was technically well equipped. The other group rated these things lower, so it made sense that their overall satisfaction with school was also lower. The interesting thing was that they had similarly rated the statement: "The school requires high level of performance", but had big differences in rating the statement "the challenges I face in school are appropriate". The results shown by cluster analysis are meaningful, as means and medians of different variables don't show the same kind of connections as a powerful clustering. After having analysed the quantitative part, I moved on to the qualitative data. I had two main types of qualitative questions: how would you change/improve the school and what are the best and worst parts of each main subject of the specific class. I merged similar statements under more general terms (coded the data) but I was careful not to lose any data and include all topics. Then I organized these under subtitles/topics. The points to improve section was organized around the same topics as the quantitative data analysis. This way in the final report the qualitative data could be used to explain and enrich the information we get from the quantitative analysis.

Reporting results Reporting the results happened three ways: a detailed 40 page report was sent to the headmaster and the Quality Assurance Committee of the school; I created a power point presentation that was presented at the first staff meeting in September by the teacher responsible for quality assurance in the school; finally a short version of the report was created for each group of teachers that were mentioned in the questionnaire: Hungarian, Romanian, Mathematics, History, Sciences, English. This way every staff member could hear the points that concern them the most.

Counseling of failed students

I arrived to the school during the last few weeks of teaching, when there was a lot of talk about failing students, different ways they could avoid failing, and a lot of talk about students who wouldnt even bother to complete an extra assignment/pass a simple test to avoid failing the year. A student who has doesnt reach the passing average for the year has to take an exam in late august/early September from the whole year material for the subject. I started wondering how these students were expected to learn the same material they couldnt learn over a year with the help of the teacher and colleagues in just two months, completely alone. The principle said to discuss the matter with the school psychologist. Together with the school psychologist we soon we started planning the summer support "service" for students who failed. It was supposed to help them keep on track with their learning, to improve their SRL skills and to help them feel less alone with this burden. The problem was to convince the students to contect us. I started telling the students about this opportunity in every class I went with the survey, and we contacted the head teachers to help spread the news.

2 grade book

During the summer only one student signed up for summer counseling. With this student we agreed that he will make a plan until the end of the week, containing what he will study each week. Also, he will keep a learning diary, which he will fill out every weekend. After lengthy discussions we decided to keep in touch through emails, because he lives very far from the city. I hope that we w ere able to offer him some support, some scaffolding that helped him become better at self-regulating his learning. I attribute the lack of interest in this opportunity partly to the lack of tradition in this practice but also to the fact that it seemed that the students were looking for quick private tutoring in the subject, and what we offered they considered empty talk that they didnt have time for. Hopefully with time this attitude will change.

Updating the school website

One of my tasks was to update the school website with materials gathered from representatives of different student circles/organizations. For this I had to collect materials from students and acquaint myself with Joomla, a content manager system that the school website uses. I have never edited websites before, so I was excited to learn something new, a practical skill that might come handy someday. The Joomla administrator's interface is really user friendly when it's already set up, and very intuitive, so I managed quite quickly to learn how to edit different pages, upload files, etc. I think my experience with wordpress blogs was really useful in discovering the basic functions in Joomla, as they are quite similar at the level that I'm using it at this point. Next week I will continue updating the website. Updating the website became easier and easier the more I used the Joomla interface. I think it's a great way to empower "average" users, I believe that most people could learn quickly to edit sections in it. If more people in the school would have access to the editing rights of the website, it would be much easier to keep it up to date. Of course, the risk of something going wrong would be also bigger.

Graduation card database

This task was very important for the school as its a tedious and time-consuming task that the school has little resources for. Graduation cards are an important part of school history, the first ones dating back as early as 1930s. Every year, all graduating classes (usually 2-4 per year) have a card each that they give out to friends and family. The card is a wonderful memory, containing the names of all students and their teachers. They all have unique design that the students put a lot of effort in. I started this task by compiling a list of the classes that I could get the graduation cards from. Then I contacted the teachers and the principle, and got quite a lot from them. I scanned each one, removed any personal quotes with the help of a editing software, and uploaded them to the school server. My goal was to try to gather at least all of the classes that graduated after 1990, and I almost achieved this goal. I also managed to contact some older alumni, so all in all I collected, scanned and returned over 60 cards. I hope that someone at the school will continue this effort and soon the database will be complete.

Learning goals and attained competencies

In the following I will name each goal again, and discuss how I achieved each. I was hoping that at the end of this internship I will be able to: identify situations where my expertise is needed/can be utilized When I arrived, the school had some tasks that wanted me to do, but as this was a new situation for the school, the head-teacher suggested that I offer things that I could help the school with. For this I needed to be aware of the area of expertise, have confidence that even if I don't have much experience in doing something, I do have the skills to learn it fast. I also had to take into consideration the needs of the school and circumstances out of my control (e.g. students leaving). There were also several instances when I spontaneously realized I can help out with something (calculating averages in Excel, e.g.). Through my internship I became more confident in my skills and realized that I have practical skills that can be utilized in various circumstances. determine the resources I will need to complete a task; contact people who I could work collaboratively with Although I had a lot of independence in choosing and completing my tasks, I sought collaboration with staff members whenever possible. The counseling of the failed students was planned in association with the school psychologist, the survey and the report was the result of collaboration with the head-teacher. When updating the website I worked together with leaders of different student groups and also the teacher usually doing this task. I had to reach out to many people to gather and scan graduation cards, a task during which I found out a lot about the history of the school. Collaborating with the staff not only 10

helped my learning process and sped up the completion of the tasks, but it will also allow these small projects to continue once my internship ends. conduct a survey in an educational setting, analyze quantitative data This was my main task during the summer. It was a very valuable experience for me that would have been difficult to gain otherwise. Going through the steps of conducting a study in real-life is usually something that we only get to do when we write our master's thesis. I'm very happy I got another chance to practice this. I compiled a questionnaire containing mostly likert-scale questions, but also open-ended ones, I introduced the data, analyzed the quantitative data and synthesized the qualitative one, compiled and circulated versions of the results and produced a final report. Next time I would try to do the questionnaires digitally from the start (it would cut down the painful hours of typing in results), however I know that in some cases this is not possible (in this case it wasn't either). I would also run a pilot study to measure the reliability of the questionnaire (I had to remove items that turned out not to be reliable due to words the students didn't know). I consider this experience one of the greatest gains of this internship evaluate the possible uses and assess the affordances of different educational technologies This was done during designing the counseling service with the school psychologist. We had to find some online solution for staying in touch with the students over summer. We considered using blogs for student diaries and emails for weekly check-ins, however we encountered several problems. Many of the students were reluctant to take advantage of this possibility (which was to be expected, it's the first time learning-counseling is offered to them) and some of those who were interested didn't have access to internet. It seemed that diary entries on paper and f2f meetings were the way to go. I was also supposed to take a look at the smart-board of the school, but it was not accessible in the storage room, and anyway it could only go to the computer lab, so it wouldn't be very useful. manage a Joomla website This is a very practical skill, and I'm very glad I had the chance to learn it. Although I might not be able to set up a Joomla-website all by myself, I can edit the content of it easily. I think it's an excellent interface for an organization, as it allows users to add content and manage existing one without a lot of training. Even though the original plan changed during the 10 weeks, I still managed to achieve all my learning goals. I'm proud of myself for being able to find tasks that were as useful for the school as for my own professional development. During these few months I gained not only experience, but also confidence in acting as an expert in the field of learning, education and technology. I'm grateful for this opportunity, and for all the freedom and support I got from the school and my supervisors.

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Follow-up and evaluation

When I left I handed over the data, the original questionnaires and the reports from the Student Satisfaction Survey to the Quality Assurance Committee. Since then they have taken steps to improve the areas which received lower ratings. They also did a SWOT analysis of the situation based on the results, and asked the different subject teachers as well as the directorate to prepare a plan about how they will try to improve those issues in the upcoming year(s). The graduation card database will be soon online, making these unique parts of school history visible. Although the school psychologist changed this year, Ive been told that she has been informed about the counseling idea and seemed to be willing to invest time and effort in it, so perhaps next year the envelope containing the notice that the student has failed will also contain information about counseling opportunity in learning strategies. I received very positive feedback about my internship in the Apczai Csere Jnos high school. It seemed that the school is open to changes and is very progressive, but change comes slowly due to lack of funds and exhausted staff. My stay offered them an opportunity to research student moral and satisfaction level and make changes based on it. I learnt a lot over these ten weeks, and Im very happy that I could be part of this process.

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