Hello, class. As you know, we are not meeting next week, Sept. 9, as I will be out of town. I do want you to continue posting at least once per week on this blog, however. Here are some possible discussion topics for Week Three:
Have you ever tried your hand at teacher research? How did it go? What did you learn?
Pretend that you have to argue to your university advisor that a teacher research approach is valid for your PhD dissertation. How would you frame this argument? Would points would you be sure to include?
Narratives are stories. Many teacher research studies are researched and/or disseminated through narrative or storytelling. Do you think this storytelling undermines the "seriousness" of the research? Why or why not? How do you feel about narrative research as a methodology?
Often teacher research questions stem from a teacher trying an approach in class and finding that it doesn't work as hoped. The research question then becomes, "why" didn't it work? The focus is on closing the gap between expectations and reality. Do you think this is a good way for teachers to approach teacher research? Why or why not?
Other topics of interest???
On Thursday Janet asked me to share a little bit about the school that I worked at and asked if our teachers were encouraged to do teacher research. At the time, I couldn't think of anything concrete to share with the class, but the very next day, I was sent an email that reminded me of one of the biggest ways we are encouraged to do teacher research by our district.
ReplyDeleteWithin our district, it takes five years to become tenure. Prior to that five year mark, there is a strict observation schedule that teachers are to follow. This recently was ratified to be more flexible both for teachers and administrators. The first two years that you are a teacher in our district, you have to have three formal observations each year (one per trimester). Each of these observations includes (but is not limited to) a pre-observation meeting (where you discuss what you have been teaching over the last couple of weeks and all of your lesson plans from the week that you will be observed), the actual observation,and post observation meeting. In addition, each teacher is required to set a minimum of three goals that he/she is to track and discuss at each of their observation meetings. This is where it becomes different! After the first two years, you get put into the 3-5 year category. Our district gives us the option starting at year three to either do the formal observations as they were done in the previous two years OR to conduct sometime of teacher research that will benefit our students. This can be anything that you want it to be and is something that you follow with your observation supervisor. If you choose this option, you are required to meet with your observation supervisor at pre-determined intervals to discuss your progress. I tried this for the first time last year and found it to be a very interesting experience. The administrator that worked with me was very enthusiastic about my work and offered to help me in any way that I could think of. In addition, he has asked me on a couple of occasions to present some of my findings to the staff and work more extensively on my research topic to benefit our staff, curriculum, and possibly district.
I hope that this is encouraging to any teacher who thinks that he/she does not have time to research and teach at the same time. In the right environment both are very possible :)
Have a great week!
My “Attempt” at Teacher Research:
ReplyDeleteI would consider my one experience with teacher research as more of an “attempt” because the one time I was considering completing a teacher research project for the multicultural class I was in, I ended up deciding just to interview one student. My research interest was educating Black males because for the first time at the small Christian University where I taught I had several African-American males in my class. I also knew a little bit about the research on the education of African-American males in general (bell hooks, Signithia Fordham) and was learning quite a bit about my students’ backgrounds specifically, which was significantly different from the White, middle-class students I usually have. My hope was to be able to interview five of the Black males in my class a couple of times throughout the semester, asking them about their previous education, teaching style preferences, interests, etc.(somewhat of a semi-structured interview); however, I realized very early on that this was not going to be as simple as I thought. A couple of weeks into the semester, one of the students I was hoping to interview quit showing up and two others were only sometimes attending and, as a result of this and their being inadequately prepared for college, were failing. This all affected our relationship, and I begin to feel like it wasn’t right or at least wasn’t fair to ask these young men to help me with my research when they most likely were not going to pass the class. I decided it was best to only ask the one gentlemen who was doing well enough (one of the other students did end up passing the class, but the other three did not). I say all this to conclude that I never considered the nature of the student-teacher relationship in research. I never thought about how my position as their teacher would significantly affect our relationship; I felt like I had too much power over their grade, “success,” whatever to 1) ask a favor of them and 2) receive objective (if there is such a thing), honest answers. I was too much of a part of their “educational experience.” It seemed contradictory to say “yes, I know that the system has failed you” and “by the way, according to the course syllabus you have missed too many class periods to pass” all in the same breath. In the end, I may have failed them as a researcher and an educator. If I were to attempt to complete this project again, I would not choose students who were in my class with the delicate nature of this research question.
Defending Teacher Research:
ReplyDeleteThis is a tough one after answering the previous question as I did, which makes my first response very carefully. If I would have answered this question a year ago, I think my response would have been looser in the respect that I would have assumed that because a teacher knows his/her students best and builds relationships with them that he/she would be the best one to complete the research and even believed that it would be okay to do so without having very much knowledge about the research process; however, now I would argue that teachers 1) should have a good rationale for completing research (“systemic” research made accessible, not just the daily trial and error teachers do) in their own classrooms, 2) should have studied teacher research and the various processes for completing it, obstacles, etc. and 3) should only complete it very responsibly by completing a pilot study first to work out issues and eliminate as many of the “why didn’t it work” questions that Janet refers to in question four ahead of time, using member checking, coding, triangulation, etc.
Narratives:
I think the question of narratives being legitimate goes back to one’s purpose in completing research and the quantitative versus qualitative debate because if the purpose of qualitative research is to provide “the rest of the story,” what we do not get from the numbers of quantitative studies, then it would seem contradictory for them to then say that they do not value those pieces, the stories. Personally, I love narratives, especially for teacher research. I think it would be difficult for most teachers to reduce their qualitative findings to themes or patterns without providing the back story for the individuals they’ve studied. I don’t know that it’s possible to separate the students from the findings. Is it?
Other thoughts:
This week for my critical theory class we read Freire’s analysis of the theories of antidialogical and dialogical action where among other characteristics of antidialogical action, conquest, manipulation, cultural invasion, he mentions divide and rule, explaining that this is one method oppressors use “in order to remain in power” (p. 141). This made me wonder what role research plays in this, especially quantitative studies where our goal is to separate subjects into categories. I don’t think that the nature of quantitative research is bad is general (as we said in class, we often need the numbers to determine trends and know where to start with qualitative studies); however, the mindset and theories that surrounds quantitative research, the Central Limit Theorem, where we can measure how far one is from the “normal distribution” and the treatment of outliers (we learned methods of restructuring findings to eliminate outliers) seems problematic. And this is considered “real” research or the “hard” research, right? I guess I’m asking what role research, both quantitative and qualitative, does and should play in cultural and social reproduction and how teacher research situated within this? Does that make sense?
Beth, I like how you end your post with a question concerning quantitative and qualitative research. From what (little) I know about quantitative research and statistics, I find myself saying, with every set of numbers I read, “Yeah, okay, but what about X?” That, “what about,” is why I think qualitative research is so important. What about those outliers? Aren’t the one’s who don’t seem to fit the distribution the one’s we should be concerned with? What about the fact that we are, for lack of a better word, reducing people to numbers? I could go on and on, and to be honest, I know I am not being fair to quantitative research. I know it is important, and I know that in a perfect research world, we would have a good balance of the quantitative with the qualitative. But I worry that balance is/will be hard to come by because quantitative research is considered, as Beth mentioned, “hard” research and qualitative “soft.”
ReplyDeleteOn another note, I want to address the last two questions Janet posted – narratives / what didn’t work. I am with Beth that when it comes to narratives, it is all about one’s purpose. However, isn’t it also about perception? To answer this question myself, I have to think about whose opinions matter (personally and in the realm of research). Personally I love narratives – they are captivating and never cease to enlighten me. They bring the numbers to life. But, as Janet asks, is this research or perhaps a research add on or bonus? Of course, I think it is research, but I don’t need convincing – those who see qualitative research as “soft” do. So, how do we get others who do not value such research to value it? I feel like this is the question we need to ask ourselves. We know narrative studies are serious and important research, but what do we do to get this perspective validated by those who see story telling as lesser than?
The other question I want to discuss is whether or not writing about what didn’t work is good teacher research. My short answer is yes, and I will explain why. Last year, I embarked on a little project to “test” the way I comment on student papers. I worked with data from four years ago, when I first started teaching composition. Since I couldn’t use the students’ work in my project, only my own written comments, I decided to study how I commented, the language of my comments, whether I was directive or suggestive with my comments, etc. I was pretty excited about this project, until I began making sense of and analyzing my data. To make a long story short, I wasn’t as happy with myself as I thought I would be. I realized my commenting style was flawed. This wasn’t a success story in traditional terms, but it was for me because it allowed me to see where/what I needed to change so that I could improve as an instructor. Though my example may be a little off the mark in terms of what the question really asks, I think that doing this class project really helped me examine my commenter self. Perhaps if I were to do a similar project now, working with more recent data, I would be able to see a shift in how I comment, what I comment on, and how it helps (or doesn’t help) my students take ownership of and improve their writing. In my opinion, our “failures” are just as important as our successes because they show us how we can better ourselves as teachers and in turn help our students (which is the whole purpose to begin with).
I have tried my hand at teacher research. Last year, while taking a young adult literature course, I decided to conduct a case study. As an active teacher in a high school, I started a book club. The aim of the book club was simple: find valid classroom worth in young adult novels. Of the thirty students I invited, five stuck with the book club. Megan, Jackson, Anna, Ian, and Miranda were my “subjects”. The materials were six young adult novels (the novels were chosen from my course syllabus): The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexia, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Lang, and Jellico Road by Melina Marrchetta. They were to read a book a week, and then meet in my classroom after the school day on selected dates. For the discussion of Jellico Road we went to a coffee shop.
ReplyDeleteThrough discussion, I created a working thesis. As a high school English teacher, I was always told what novels to teach; and, it was almost a guarantee that those books were books I had read in high school. The young adult literature course created a core of frustration for me. I wanted to teach these young adult novels. I found, as an adult reader, major worth in their messages. I thought that they would teach kids just as much as Hester Prynne does in The Scarlet Letter. This is where the “working” part comes in…I knew I wanted to do something with the books, with the students’ comments, and with the current curriculum. My solution was to disclose my ideas to my subjects. I wanted them to know that I was sure that these books, aimed at tweens and teens, were saturated in moral and ethical development.
I found that the students who participated in my study were much more advanced than most of the school’s general population. Although, they found moral worth in the novels, they thought the moral lessons were a bit too “in-your-face”; however, it wasn’t as if I was proven wrong. Instead, I was steered a different direction. I found that these young adult novels were able to reach all populations of readers within their age group, when compared to the high school literature cannon. They could relate, therefore they heard and internalized the messages presented in the novels. I tested this theory with my remedial kids. I asked if anyone in my “Basic” sophomore English class wanted to participate in my study. I had two kids volunteer, and through discussion with these students, I found that moral value could be gained through these young adult novels.
Although most of the case study is narration, I did still gain some real hard evidence from this study. I found that young adult novels are wonderful moral guides for students. Although, they did not need to be taught for the messages to be received, the messages were definitely sent to the readers and the readers were able to corroborate that they received the messages.
My case study—in a nut shell :)
With a deep sigh, an adamant head nod, and the words ‘oh yes,’ I agree with Heather and her thoughts about failure being the best teacher. Until I was able to appreciate failure as a learning opportunity, teacher research was not something I could actively try. As a perfectionist there are two opposing forces: the one that says jump in there and learn how to improve, and the other that says to not expose yourself like that. Because it took me until have my high school teaching career to recognize the value of failure, I cannot say that I have actively engaged in teacher research; engaging in teacher talk, most definitely.
ReplyDeleteAs a social studies teacher, I tried to match my teaching strategies to the personalities and abilities of my students. It was my goal to find out how my students learned individually and as a class. Some classes performed better when content was delivered as a lecture. Other classes performed better when there were projects and collaborative learning. Some classes were a blend of the two, depending on the subject matter or the task. In terms of methods, I was willing to try anything if it meant a better learning experience for my students. I guess it was because I was also revising how I taught, I never saw how teacher research could happen in my classroom. There rarely was a constant from class to class or trimester to trimester. Maybe if I had made things a little more consistent, I would have realized I had time for teacher research.
In regards to narratives, I would be a poor historian if I said they were not valid research. In the late 1800s, Lyman Draper interviewed numerous individuals to capture the stories of those alive during the forming of the United States. He recognized that data would be lost if he did not travel the Midwestern and southern regions of the country to record peoples’ stories. The Draper Collection at the University of Wisconsin is one of the largest collections of recorded oral histories. Whether we read his entries to mentally reconstruct the number of bushels of corn a farmer sold in the 1840s or count the number of people who say they are related to Daniel Boone, a story is being told. Both words and numbers talk and give insights into our communities. In reading pieces of the Draper Collection or any collection of narratives, the gems are found in the hidden stories, not the words recorded verbatim.
First of all, Shay, I think the system that your corporation has for teacher development sounds fabulous. I do wonder, however, how the school deals with young teachers who are RIFed before they can make it to that 3-5 year category. I have met many teachers who have had problems with the new Indiana licensing rules because they were able to get a job and complete their first year of teaching, but then they were let go and unable to find another full-time job. They did not have an opportunity to complete the teaching portfolio during their second year and filed for extensions, but they are only able to do that so many times – then what? I realize that Indiana has done away with the portfolio, and this may not have been a problem in your district yet if it has been growing over the years, but I'm always curious about how measures that assume teachers will be in a stable situation for several years work out in reality.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, Beth, I know you feel like you weren't really able to do “teacher research” as you originally intended; however, I wonder if your reflection on the experience alone could be considered a sort of conceptual teacher research. Heather mentioned the benefits of examining what didn't work – perhaps examining why your teacher research didn't work is meta-teacher research?? I have to be careful when I get into these recursive frames of mind because they make me dizzy :-) I don't have an answer to this question – I am posing it more as a rhetorical question and am curious to know if anyone else understands what I am asking and has an opinion on the matter. In response to Janet's question, though, I agree with Heather that “why didn't it work?” is a legitimate research question. However, I feel as though it ought to be part of a larger process of elimination that eventually leads to what does work. Mistakes only become learning opportunities if one is willing to examine the circumstances leading to the mistake. I think that examining why something doesn't work, though, ought to be part of the initial discovery process that leads to developing a new technique to test in the classroom.
I am most interested in continuing to discuss narratives and their legitimacy in research. Like many of you, I also love narratives and feel as though I learn best (or learn more) from narrative accounts. One of my favorite childhood voices is that of Paul Harvey, whose tag line is “. . . and now you know the rest of the story.” Marianne touched on this in her post and also made a comment along those lines during class regarding the ability of qualitative researcher's ability to find the hidden voices, to find what is missing in the numbers. I always want to know the rest of the story, I want to know what the numbers mean in terms of human experience, I want to know what the numbers we don't have might mean.
To be continued. . .
Part II (sorry I have gotten long-winded)
ReplyDeleteI thought Beth made a great point regarding the ways in which data sets from quantitative research create lines of division along categories and push students into neat groups that are supposed to make the application of various teaching techniques very cut-and-dried and easy for teachers to implement. I'm of the same opinion as some of our textbooks' authors that research which promotes that kind of thinking deprofessionalizes teachers, but it also bothers me because it dehumanizes students. Using narrative as a research methodology and as a format for the presentation of research is a useful tool for remind those who make policy that both teachers and students are human beings whose futures are at stake. I think that would be the best argument I could make when talking to an administrator about the efficacy of teacher research. Yes, it would give me a chance to reflect on and evalute my decisions as a teacher, but more importantly, it might serve to bring a human face back to educational statistics and re-emphasize the importance of local control in policy decisions.
My last thought is regarding the possible drawbacks of narrative. This is just something I thought about while reading Heather's post about ways of statistically eliminating outliers. What is interesting to me is that we can eliminate them statistically, and yet often the narratives of the outliers are those that are held up as examples of the “if so-and-so did it, anyone can!” like Abraham Lincoln, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, etc. Of course these narratives are distorted – yes, Bill Gates dropped out of college, but his parents were millionaires and had lots of millionaire friends who funded his work. The kind of math that Albert Einstein failed is the kind of math that people who major in math in college sometimes have trouble understanding. The reason he was working as a patent clerk was not because he was so humble and misunderstood; it is because he was an arrogant ass who pissed off so many professors that he couldn't get a job teaching at a university. I think we have to really guard against manipulating narratives in this way.
Thinking about why something in our classroom didn't work--as a way of closing the gap between expectations and reality--seems to be an important way for teachers to research. As Heather points out in her post, we may think that we are accomplishing one thing with our instruction while, in reality, we are also making many other unintended meanings.
ReplyDeleteWe use this method of asking why something didn't work in our everyday life. For example, if I cook something and don't like the way it tastes I will ask myself "what went wrong?" "what else does this need? "more salt?" etc. I 'research' my own life in this way all the time. And, if it is effective for helping me improve outcomes in my daily life, why not take this method into the classroom as well? To be an effective instructor I need to seek to understand the difference between what the meanings I think I make in my classroom and the way those meanings are realized and interpreted by my students.
I love all of the comments from this week. It seems like we have all had some interesting experiences with teacher research, although all are very different.
ReplyDeleteCourtney - I wanted to take a minute and try to answer your question in regards to your questions as to how my district handles teachers who are rifed. Our district has yet to lay anybody off and do not currently have any plans to do so. Our district policy has always been not to spend until we actually have funds. Therefore, when funds didn't come and all of the other districts were going into debt, we just didn't purchase some of the things we were intending to purchase, etc. But, our district policy in terms of years of experience and evaluation options is specified to the number of years of experience within our district. So, a teacher with five years of overall experience, but only one year in the district, would have the same evaluation process as a first or second year teacher. I believe that if you leave the district for a year or more (for any reason), I think you start over again in terms of the way in which you are evaluation.