So yesterday at 4:46 pm I officially emailed the final, finished copy of my 10,000 word confirmation report to my supervisors and research services. I most certainly felt relief, even though I was not 100% happy with my method and data analysis section. But all evening I was relaxed and happy, not a care in the world. Much like this cat seemingly joyfully sleeping! Yep, that was me!

By this morning I had pretty much gone back into work mode. What’s next? What is most urgent? What does my to-do list look like?

Well number 1, I have not been doing 10 hours per week of work for the Academic Learning Centre (ALC) which means I need to do quote a few online assignments (read and provide feedback for students) to catch up my hours there. It’s somewhat tedious work but I know the students benefit from it, so I don’t mind too much. The other aspect is that for each assignment I am allocated 1 hour, but I finish most of them within 40-45 minutes.

The second priority is the book chapter that Ondine and I are working on. It is a scoping literature review and we are still ploughing through the search results in an excel spreadsheet, essentially mining the data from them. I was doing a good job of chipping away at that for a while. I got through around 70 search results over a period of about 10 weeks. Then confirmation became the priority and I haven’t done any for a while. Mind you, neither has my co-author! So I guess we’re even! None of it really mattered because the editors were still preparing the book proposal to go to Springer.

Well I received an email this morning, Springer are keen to publish the book based on the proposal, fantastic news! But now we have a timeline! It is not feeling easily achievable, but I know that rushed, last minute chapters have got through in the past, and will do into the future! Heck, my confirmation report was totally rushed, much to my disgust. So I’m meeting with Ondine today to essentially say, we NEED to put the accelerator on NOW! Chapters must be submitted for peer review September 18th.

Now just in case I haven’t talked about this book chapter before I’ll give you a bit of a rundown on how it came to be. It started with the scoping literature review searches I have done as part of my PhD. I was using terms like “minority groups” and “self-efficacy” but for my PhD I was only looking for articles that talk about the students self-efficacy, however I got quite a few results that were talking about the teacher’s self-efficacy. So I kept them to one side as a point of interest. Then when this particular call for chapters came out I realised I had around 60 articles based on teacher self-efficacy relating to teaching diverse student groups that could be the beginning of a literature review.

So I pitched it to Ondine who was happy to join with me and we put in an abstract! Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well we have since done an additional search and got around 110 search results to go through. And we can see some common themes already. Most articles propose that teacher education should include work experience with diverse student groups, usually including special education (in Australia we have some schools especially for students with disabilities). They also commonly refer to ongoing PD for teachers and mentors or support within schools for teachers.

So that covers number 1 and 2 on my list now, of course I also have the revisions for the digital literacy paper, surveys to send out for the TAFE project, ethics application for my PhD, planning the actual presentation for confirmation of candidature and marking will start at the end of next week. No rest for the wicked they say!