I listen and I believe,I see and I understand: a collective reflection approach to understanding children's learning experiences

The project on which this report is based set out to establish how exploring children's musicality might encourage adults to consider their engagement with the musical play and learning of children under the age of five. Through reflection and evaluation the participants became aware that they were challenging their own teaching style in response to the children's exploratory learning. This became the central focus for the practitioners involved as it changed their understanding of their own practice. This paper endeavours to share the findings pertaining to the reflection, collaboration and change process of participants involved in the research project. It also describes practitioner involvement in this programme as an effective example of encouraging non-academic practitioners to take part in educational research.     

Leading change from within: action research to strengthen curriculum leadership in a primary school

Practitioner research lends itself to situations in which a school wishes to examine and improve practice. This is an account of one middle-sized primary school's attempt to understand the nature of and need for a variety of forms of curriculum leadership by engaging in a facilitated action research project. Both theory and current school practice in New Zealand related to school structure and distribution of curriculum leadership were investigated. The senior management team, acting as an action research group, set out to analyse an ill-defined problem and then designed and implemented change strategies that incrementally involved all staff. The outcomes of the project for the school were context specific and immediate and are made public with the intention of offering insights into the research process and results to a wider audience who can consider the transferability of ideas in this account to their own settings. Leading change from within by embarking on action research is a challenge and a commitment for practitioners. Whilst the demands of this project are acknowledged by the practitioners themselves, they also confirm the benefits of a systematic, considered process and the opportunities for team learning implicit in this critical, constructive and collaborative approach to improving management practice.     

Teachers’ conceptions of teacher-research and self-perceptions as enquiring practitioners—A longitudinal case study

Recognizing the importance teachers’ own voices play in their own professional development, the case study reported in this paper aims to illuminate the role that formal instruction and immersion in research can play in shaping teachers’ views of teacher-research and of themselves as future enquiring practitioners. The study was conducted with a group of nine overseas teachers attending a B.Ed. (Honours) degree in TEFL run by a higher education institution in Britain. Data were collected via questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and field notes from direct observation. Using a grounded theory methodology, the multiple sources of data were integrated into a theoretical model of ways of describing teacher research. The results of the study confirm previous assumptions that the highly-structured nature of the academic format of doing and reporting research may fall short of providing teachers with skills and tools for reflection that are easily transferable to practice.     

What is open learning?

The recent change in this journal's title, from Teaching at a Distance to Open Learning, poses obvious questions of definition. What is open learning? And how does it relate to distance education and adult education? In this article, Roger Lewis, Head of Educational Development Unit at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, makes use of his considerable and varied experience of working with the Open University, the Council for Educational Technology, the Open Tech, the National Extension College and other practitioners of open learning in providing some answers. Readers should find the analytical tools and examples included in the article of considerable use in examining their own experiences in the open learning field.     

Building an Intervention: A Theoretical and Practical Infrastructure for Planning,Implementing, and Evaluating a Metropolitan-Wide School-To-Career Initiative

A blueprint for planning, implementing, and evaluating (PIE) an intervention is presented against the backdrop of a construction analogy. Emphasized is the interplay among theory, research, and practice throughout the PIE process, and operationalized are key terms to guide planners in their own PIE process. A model of ecological innovation and change, the assimmodation innovation model, is introduced to explain the process associated with the implementation and adoption of an innovation and to inform a containment × change and growth model of social action and human development. Illustrated is Kansas City's Business/Education Expectations (BE2): School-To-Career Partnership, a comprehensive, metropolitan-wide, multiple-county school reform initiative that developed out of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 that seeks a pedagogy and curriculum that enhances student achievement through authentic, contextual, real world thinking and experience.     

SOME THOUGHTS ON ATTITUDES: A STARTING POINT FOR CREATIVE WORK WITH THE ELDERLY

Teachers who share and facilitate creativity with the elderly are working in a new field in which research and training are in fledgling stages. This article suggests that a starting point for practitioners in this field should be an investigation of their own attitudes and of their elderly students. Further, the article attempts to bridge what is known about attitudes on aging and the aged with teaching and learning experience in the arts.     

Parents’ past experiences as a mediational tool for understanding their child’s current mathematical learning

This article explores the ways in which parents use their own past experiences as a mediational tool for understanding their child’s current school learning. Following a sociocultural approach parents’ past experiences were examined drawing on the notions of (1) heterochronicity, which looks at the partially overlapping histories of the individual and society and (2) prolepsis whereby the imagined future mediates and constrains the world of the present. The analysis draws on 22 interviews with parents whose children were from three primary multiethnic schools in a town in the Southeast of England. The findings brought to light the means by which parents can either intentionally or unintentionally use the past to inform their current representations and practices. Thus at times they use their past experiences to mediate internalisation (reproduction of the experience), at other times they use them to promote externalisation (change brought about by the experience). It is within this process that parents projected a future ideal for their child, which was either congruent or discordant with their own past.     

The student–staff partnership movement: striving for inclusion as we push sectorial change

ABSTRACT

A growing number of practitioners are re-envisioning higher education through student–staff partnership. Such a culture shift toward partnership can only be achieved through collaborative efforts among academic developers, other faculty/staff, and students. Using evidence from literature and my own reflections, I map the ways this partnership movement is unfolding across contexts. In doing so, I hope to provide a sense of camaraderie for practitioners in outlining how individual practices contribute to sectorial change, to question how we could be more inclusive in this movement, and to provide suggestions for expanding the movement in the future.     

Research and Theory as Necessary Tools for Organizational Training and Performance Improvement Practitioners

Human Performance Technology (HPT) is the applied study and practice of improving organizational performance through training and non-training interventions. For practitioners working in this area that identify themselves as an HPT practitioner, organizational training and performance (OTP) specialist, or instructional designer—offering the right intervention set requires understanding of how humans work and function internally and within organizations that are bounded by environmental, societal, and economic realities. The HPT field is rooted in a multi-disciplinary knowledge base and has its own models and theories, which are generally developed by practitioners to guide their practice. Because HPT follows a systematic, data-driven process akin to action research, HPT practitioners are applied researchers even if they do not see themselves as such. What we need is more collaboration between scholars, practitioners, professional associations, and businesses to create a culture of engagement and involve everybody in the validation of applied research and theory development.     

Experimenter Confirmation Bias and the Correction of Science Misconceptions

This paper describes a randomised educational experiment (n?=?47) that examined two different teaching methods and compared their effectiveness at correcting one science misconception using a sample of trainee primary school teachers. The treatment was designed to promote engagement with the scientific concept by eliciting emotional responses from learners that were triggered by their own confirmation biases. The treatment group showed superior learning gains to control at post-test immediately after the lesson, although benefits had dissipated after 6?weeks. Findings are discussed with reference to the conceptual change paradigm and to the importance of feeling emotion during a learning experience, having implications for the teaching of pedagogies to adults that have been previously shown to be successful with children.     

Under-tapped potential: practitioner research as a vehicle for widening participation

Abstract

Practitioners working to widen participation to universities in England are an increasingly important and professionally diverse group but surprisingly absent from the academic literature and lacking in access to bespoke professional development pathways in HE. In England current approaches within policy and research also tend to position them as gatherers of evidence with a mission to inform change rather than developing their capacity to be(come) agents of change in their own right. Drawing on the perspectives of three widening participation practitioners who had recently completed a research-based MA, this paper explores the opportunity that this provided to illuminate the complexities encountered in routine practice, contributing to positive change. Rather than being methodologically inferior, practitioner research emerged as highly complementary and in the case of WP its transformative potential is currently hugely under-tapped.     

Science education, integral inquiry, transformation and possibility

This paper is written in response to Nancy Davis’s article Integral Methodological Pluralism in Science Education Research: Valuing Multiple Perspectives. I use Integral Theory as a framing for this response to explore how it might offer different perspectives and ways of inquiring into Nancy’s paper. This process highlights the notion of integral inquiry as a potential for personal transformation. I give an autobiographical account of my own experience in utilising Integral Theory as part of my PhD and its impact on my own becoming. For another perspective I interview Nancy to draw out deeper shared meanings.     

Deferred creativity: Exploring the impact of an undergraduate learning experience on professional practice

This paper explores the impact of an art-based learning experience on former Education students' professional practice. Feedback from trainee teachers indicated that the true value of the creative process was only realised after they had graduated – what I have come to term ‘deferred creativity’. The findings suggest that focusing on the development of their own creative characteristics, skills and attitudes helped students to become more creative practitioners. By drawing on the reflections of our alumni, we can help future students to develop the key creative competencies and skills required for 21st century life.     

Belief change towards self-directed learning in student teachers: immersion in practice or reflection on action

Although belief change in student teachers constitutes a more important aim in programmes of teacher education than knowledge transmission per se, it is by no means clear what prompts a meaningful transition from existing — and often implicit — beliefs to professionally oriented frameworks for teaching. Reflection-oriented learning by student teachers has been put forward as the major route towards helping them to grow in their practice teaching, and to actively involve them in changing and (re)constructing their own knowledge base for teaching. However, practice teaching often severely challenges these constructed beliefs, and so reflection subsequently loses its claim to be a guide to future action. In this study, the dynamic interchange between reflection and immersion into practice teaching is related to the process of belief change, with student teachers engaging in self-directed teaching methods. It challenges long-held assumptions by indicating that reflection after practice may be a more professionally fruitful way of effecting belief change than reflectively preparing student teachers before they enter their practice teaching, with beliefs which are not grounded in their own teaching experience.     

Lecturing in Post‐Compulsory Education: profession,occupation or reflective practice?

Abstract

This paper argues that a new conceptualisation of teaching in post‐compulsory education is required. Taking into account the radical ideology‐driven change experienced in the sector in recent times, it is suggested that there are difficulties with the model of the lecturer as a ‘professional’, chief amongst which is that lecturers do not seem to think of themselves in this way. It is suggested that any alternative conceptualisation must: (i) take into account lecturers' own conceptions of their working practices, (ii) reflect the range of these practices, and (Hi) reflect the epistemological and ethical basis of teaching, in particular lecturers' sense of the value and worth of what they do. Finally, some implications of the proposed model of teaching for management practice and development, and the potential of the approach for theory practice and practitioners, are explored.     

Re-authoring research conversations: beyond epistemological differences and toward transformative experience for researchers and educators

Common sense and published literature both assert that education research is often dismissed by practitioners on the grounds that it is irrelevant to their work. Some have argued that this is due primarily to a mismatch of professional epistemologies. While agreeing in principle, this work draws on work in sociology (Erving Goffman) and literary theory (Mikhail Bakhtin) to argue that practitioner mistrust of research may be primarily related to differences in the presentation of self in the teaching (and research) profession and a history of research used as a tool of transgression in the authorship of the practitioner professional self. Goffman’s account of frontstage and backstage settings in the everyday presentation of self is combined with Bakhtin’s account of the ways research erases the voice of practitioners by reducing their fundamentally dialogic experiences to monologic narratives dominated by the voice of the researcher. As an alternative, I draw on the work of the research psychologist Jerome Bruner and the practicing clinical psychologist Michael White to explore ways in which practitioners might be more meaningfully engaged in the research enterprise through a process of re-narrativizing their own experiences captured as part of research. Narrative techniques that help share responsibility for authoring accounts of practice among researchers and practitioners as research participants are described leading to conclusions about the potential transformative nature of such work for both researchers and practitioners.     

‘I know it’s not proper research,but…’: how professionals’ understandings of research can frustrate its potential for CPD

This article draws upon the work of two researchers who facilitated practitioner research with school professionals in Liverpool. The researchers themselves had not been involved in practitioner research before. In this account, the researchers reflect critically upon their own experience. The discussion presents the learning curve that the researchers underwent as well as what they discovered about the relationship between practitioners and researchers when engaged in school‐based research. Crucially the issue of practitioners’ understandings of what constituted ‘good’ research emerged as a significant issue. In particular, positivist notions of research that drew from popular scientific understandings, as well as the culture of numerical targeting in the schools system, seemed to shape these practitioners’ sense of what was expected of them as practitioner‐researchers. The article finishes by reflecting upon the possible lessons that this work presents for education managers considering practitioner research approaches for continuing professional development (CPD).     

A Reflection on Aging: A Portfolio of Change in Attitudes Toward Geriatric Patients During a Clerkship Rotation

The process of students' evaluation in medical schools has changed from a tutor-led evaluation system based on students' performance to a student-based evaluation that involves self-reflection and their level of change in skills and attitudes. At the McGill University Division of Geriatric Medicine, we developed an innovative system of evaluation known as the McGill Electronic Evaluation Portfolio (MEEP). The MEEP has proven to be a useful tool to motivate students' self-reflection and to induce students' change in attitudes toward aging and Geriatric Medicine. In this article, we exemplified a process of self-reflection by a medical student throughout his mandatory clerkship rotation in Geriatric Medicine. The article shows his change in attitudes toward his geriatric patients induced by his own experience and his interactions with tutors and members of the multidisciplinary team. In summary, the use of an electronic evaluation method may stimulate students' self-reflection and a positive change in attitudes toward aging and geriatrics.     

A completed research and development work project in school: The teachers’ learning and possibilities, premises and challenges for further development

The article is based on a follow-up study of a research and development work project with school leaders and teachers conducted in a Norwegian lower secondary school. The purpose is to present an understanding of what the practitioners find they have learned during the project and how they experience the situation with regard to development about two years after the project has ended. The study concludes that continuity in both leadership and the teaching staff means that the involved practitioners can develop an identity with a common objective over time, and that development can then be seen as improvement.