**6. Research participation**

Permission had been gained from Education Queensland, school principals, and university Ethics Approval had been received. Principals indicated that staff could volunteer to be involved and suggested a number of parents and students who would be interested in this research because of its relevancy for them. Students took part in focus group discussions at each school. Staff and parents engaged in individual conversations with the researchers. Conversations were digitally recorded and then transcribed by the researchers themselves.

Purposive sampling was utilised in alignment with what Cohen et al. [32] advised researchers to consider: sample size, representativeness, access to the sample; and the sampling, where too large a sample might become unwieldy and too small a sample might be unrepresentative. In total 25 teaching staff were involved in the data collation exercise – 15 (10% of fractional and full-time teaching staff) from PS1 and 10 (7.5% of fractional and full-time teaching staff) from PS2. Eight students were interviewed in a focus group from each school. In addition, several teacher aides and parents were interviewed. Collectively the data represents the viewpoints of approximately 45 participants.

The first interpretation of the data drew on the perceptions and stories of students, teachers, and teacher aides. For the purpose of capturing the initial picture of pedagogical and cultural 'reality', data collected from principal interviews were not included in this chapter although these findings will be reported in the near future [33]. The reasoning behind this decision was to ensure that we captured the voice of the people who experienced the reality of the 'the way we do things around here' and therefore seen by those operating at the classroom level. It is through the day to day operations that norms and assumptions underlying school culture are illuminated. Some participants referred to actions by the principal or other members of the leadership team. The collation of these perceptions infers a number of leadership characteristics integral to each school's 'ways of working'.

The semi-structured interview approach allowed participant discussions to illustrate additional related ideas as interesting points emerged. Excerpts of interview data illustrating findings have been woven throughout this chapter. Schools have been numbered (PS1 and PS2) and participants identified by a coding system: Teacher 1 – T1; Teacher Aide 1 – TA1; Parent 1 – P1; Student – S1; and, Head of the Special Education Program – HOSE.
