April and i just finished meeting about the research paper we are working on for EMI (educational media international) – so we need to keep reminding ourselves of our audience – technology people that are intested in how particular technologies support particular kinds of learning.
So we had a conversation that jumped around quite a bit (I was part of it, so naturally, it changed focus about 436 times). As a means of letting you know what we are doing and for me to get my own mind around it, I thought I would do my best to kind of synthesize our conversation and where we left off:
We started with an original research question of:
How do teachers’ perceive their blogging contributing to their development as reform-minded science teachers?
But then we considered: how can we make (and not force) a claim that blogging can specifically be attributed to learning? How can we twease out that learning of development cannot be attributed to other factors? And what measure do we really have about how teachers perceived this? (we did consider the blogging survey and focus groups)
After discussing the amount of comments that 474 have exchanged with one another, we are thinking of altering our focus to ‘recognition’ – recognition of and by others and self. This requires operationalizing/defining ‘recognition’ (think Gee). Our question has now become:
In what ways do blogs allow teachers to be recognized? (and if data supports it:)
In what ways do blogs allow teachers to be recognized as reform-minded teachers? (again, an operationalized definition (is that redundant?) of reform-minded would be needed)) Think Windschitl’s 4 dilemmas – we are wondering if there are any themes in the blogs about particular issues specific to reform-minded professionals. Furthermore, if we can locate such themes (3 or 4), are there questions in the RSTS that relate to these themes in which we can use the data from the pre and post test to support an improvement in terms or importance or practices.
RSTS recap: RSTS asked teahers to rate (scale 0-4) 25 items with 5 pertaining to each category:
1. lesson design and implementation
2. propositional knowledge (conceptual understandings, connections)
3. procedural knowledge (using a variety of activities, means, to engage thinking)
4. communicative interactions (between students, between teacher and students)
5. student/teacher relationship
We then asked students to rate each question according to 3 things:
1. How well it described their classroom practices
2. The level of personal importance
3. Feasibilty
Okay – got all that?
We also recieved some critique recently about not having our research question really align with our methods of data analysis. So if anyone has ideas, we are open ears (or laptops as it were).
So both posts are focused on comments…I think this is key. One piece that I have struggled with is that recognition can hit in many different ways. That is, another post can also recognize the person. In a classblog setting, the later posts using a similar format or idea can be recognition. Then in your situation, was there recognition occurring in the classroom or between colleagues offline that was recognition work.
Tough to capture….but worth the work!!
Hi Liz –
I like the 5 categories from the RSTS/RTOP: Do you think they could be used to code for “focus of posts?” The 4 Windschitl categories I was referring to this time were not the dilemmas — he and his group are operationalizing reform-based practices as consisting of four main components (which are much richer, I think, than the 5 RTOP ones I just talked about, but we didn’t explicitly scaffold our students this way). Here are their 4 categories:
1. Selecting “Big Ideas” in Science: This is the degree to which participants were able to identify the major underlying ideas in a curriculum and teach to those ideas, as opposed to teaching mere “topics”. If for example a participant was given a curriculum unit on the ocean’s tides, they might understand that the big idea behind this phenomenon was the gravitational relationships between the earth, moon, and sun. A topic centered focus, on the other hand, would mean that one might teach the definition of what is meant by high tide and low tide, how often they occur, and where they occur.
2. Teaching for Epistemic Fluency: This is the degree to which participants helped their pupils to understand that the currency of scientific knowledge is not a set of facts, but rather models and theories that are testable, revisable, conjectural, and explanatory.
3. Pressing Students for Evidence-based Explanations of Science Phenomena: This is the degree to which participants focused their pupils’ on underlying causes of events and processes, rather than simply having them look for patterns and trends in data. Observations are used, as evidence, to support claims one makes about causes.
4. Teaching as “Working on Student Ideas.” This is the degree to which participants elicited their pupils’ ideas at the outset of a unit of instruction and then made instructional decisions based on pupils’ initial understandings.
(Mark Windschitl, Jessica Thompson, Melissa Braaten, 2008, AERA)
Okay, now just thinking aloud myself:
* Do we want to talk about “recognition” in the context of social networking (title of EMI special edition)? How, if at all, would that change anything?
* Documenting our conversation about types of recogition work (see Sfard & Prusak, 2007?)
In blog posts
R of others
R of self (explicitly)
R of self (implicitly)
Through comments
R by others
R of others
R of self (explicitly and implicitly)
Peanut just woke up… Gotta stop for the momment…
Good start! Hope these ramblings are helpful,
*A-
Oh!!! That makes much more sense! (Not Windschitl dilemmas, but categories that operationalize reform-based practices) Not sure those categories are present in the blogs, but I will get back to you.
These do give me a better sense of how to operationalize ‘recognition’.
Thanks!