#Educon 2.4: Talking Teacher Research

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Bud Hunt

Later today, I’m honored to be joining my friends and colleagues Jon Becker and Meredith Stewart as we facilitate a session at Educon 2.4 on teacher research and professional development. Specifically, on how we can be critical, in a good way, in our choice and craft of professional development. Here’s the session description:

#edchat
#RSCON3
#140edu
#TEDx______
#edcamp____

Many of the educators who participate(d) in the events listed above and others like them report that the events are/were perfectly wonderful; amazing even. Apparently, this social media-aided PD is more powerful than any PD they’ve ever done; better than any grad school course they’ve taken. And, it may very well be.

But, many of the folks who take part in events like these have been at it for a couple/few years now. And, we’ve become pretty good at sharing what they’re learning and even doing. Theres value in talking about and sharing ideas and actions, but that only gets us so far. Furthermore, many knowledge claims are made about how awesome these ideas are. Students are learning more! Students are so much more engaged! etc.

So, then, what are the warrants for these knowledge claims? What evidence is there that all of these new forms of professional learning are making a difference for kids?

Think of it this way: imagine parents of a student in your classroom wants to know if the new stuff you’ve tried with their kid this year worked. How would you respond? What evidence would you offer? Imagine a principal considering awarding you professional development credits for participation in these events. How would you convince the principal that these professional learning experiences are legitimate?

My favorite part is that we’ll be talking about what a teacher research study designed by the participants of the Educon session might look like. If you’re around at 11:00am Mountain/1pm Eastern, we’d love to have you join us for the conversation. Here’s the session information on the Educon website. A stream should be available from that page.

Join us.

Schooling That Isn’t School-y

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Bud Hunt

I sat in on a meeting today of the organizers of our school district’s Innovation Academy, a summer STEM enrichment program that’s a partnership between the district and IBM.¹

The DLC will be embedding a teacher research group within the Innovation Academy and its planning in order to see if the work they’re doing, and that students and district staff are enthusiastic about, has something to teach us about how we can make positive change in the classroom.

During the meeting, two statements really caught my ear and got me thinking about the work ahead.

The first was a statement, made during the meeting and repeated by several folks in the conversation, that the goal of Innovation Academy was to create an environment that didn’t feel anything like school. Both our district staff and our business partners felt this was important. I find that both makes sense to me and is, well, rather odd. That we’ve a shared understanding of school as something that isn’t conducive to learning is troubling, but I get where they’re coming from.

The other thing that caught my ear was a mention, in passing, by one of the IBM partners that during last year’s camp, he noticed that the younger students involved in the camp, Kindergarteners, were plenty able to think in creative and nontraditional ways. That’s not quite how he said it, though. He actually said that sometimes, the youngest students were the best able to be engaged in the work of the camp².

If, of course, we are trying to build learning experiences that are not at all like school, then it makes sense that our least schooled students would be the best at them. Of course, it’s also possible that the Kindergartners at Camp Innovation are students who’ve not yet had their imaginations stamped out by school.

I’m eager to begin the observational work of documenting what makes the Innovation Academy exciting and engaging for students and staff. And also I’m looking forward to teacher researchers teasing out if they can fiddle with their classrooms in ways that make school less school-y.

There is something worth going after in the space between the school-y and the not so school-y. I hope it’s a piece of the possible future of public schools.

Last year, the project was called Camp Innovation. Names change. I like the camp metaphor, but it wasn’t my call. [↩]
And now academy. [↩]

#DMLBadges for Teachers: We Missed Here, Too

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Bud Hunt

Justin Reich and I recently submitted a proposal to the DML Teacher Mastery and Feedback Badges Competition. And, like my recent submission to the DML Conference, it wasn’t accepted.

But that’s cool. I was curious about the process and I learned a bunch about the problems and opportunities of badges and badging. In case you were curious, below is the full text of the application. You can read the winning Stage 1 proposals on the DML Competition Website.

Teacher inquiry has long been recognized as a valuable way for teachers and students to critically examine their learning and pedagogy. We define teacher inquiry, sometimes called teacher action research, as a process by which teachers identify a problem of practice, gather data about that problem, systematically analyze that data, prepare a public presentation (lecture, workshop, published article) about their findings, and then adopt a series of action steps to improve instruction. In countries with very successful national curricula, such as Japan and Singapore, systematic teacher inquiry practices such as lesson study are central to efforts to improve educational systems and help individual teachers develop as practitioners.

In the decentralized education ecosystem of the United States, teacher action research has been adopted less systematically, but it remains a promising and powerful approach. For instance, the DataWise program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has had tremendous success in helping schools and teachers adopt a structured cycle of inquiry in order to use assessment data to improve instructional practice. We propose the development of a badge recognition system for teacher recognition activities. Such a system would both encourage teachers to engage in these effective professional learning practices and to provide teachers and districts with a map through the complex landscape of teacher action research.

Several structural factors in American schools limit the degree to which teacher have opportunities to practice teacher inquiry and teacher action research. In particular, most districts structure professional learning time around a series of “early release” or professional development days. Often, these days are filled with lecture-based teacher professional development which teachers often find to be both useless and boring (teacher professional development is one of the truly shameful elements of our national education system). Teachers are rewarded for their seat time in these professional learning opportunities with Professional Development Points or Continuing Education Units, which are required for recertification, tenure, salary steps, or other rewards in the system. These structures and schedules are not well suited for nurturing teacher action research, which requires a more flexible allocation of time and energy. Generating questions, data collection, data analysis, preparing reflections, and adopting refined practices cannot be broken up into arbitrary chunks of time throughout the year, as these activities need to be tied in with the classroom lessons, projects, and activities that a teacher is trying to improve.

In an attempt to change this dynamic, the St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado created the Digital Learning Collaborative in the Fall of 2009. The DLC introduces intentional institutional subversion through a model that re-centers teachers as both learners and researchers and incorporates a two-year approach. Attachment 1 gives more background on the DLC. Through a partnership with the Colorado State University Writing Project, and informed by the teacher inquiry work of the National Writing Project, these teacher researchers in the DLC are emerging as experts in residence in their schools, not as outsiders, but as insiders invested in the schools and students they serve. The DLC by design allows for the research of its members to spread throughout the district and, through the use of the Web, beyond.

As these teacher researchers, and others like them, move from novice to more experienced roles, they have value to add to their communities as practitioner researchers who are well equipped to ask difficult questions and seek out answers from the communities they serve. But how do teacher researchers develop the skills that they need to possess to engage in thoughtful inquiry? And, how do others know that these teacher researchers are well equipped to serve in that role within organizations they might join later?

Badges, we believe, can help.

We envision that open badges might have two specific roles to play within the teacher researcher community, both outlined below.

1. Teacher Researcher Badges as Instructional Pathfinders

The role of teacher researcher is not too terribly different from the role of a teacher. Like researchers, teachers are expected to make good use of the data around them in order to better understand a situation, in this case, a studentʼs learning. A teacher researcher has a more formal and specific role to play with regards to how he or she interacts with the data to dig for deeper understanding. Badges can help to identify the skills involved in conducting teacher research and provide an instructional path for prospective teacher researchers to follow as they begin to explore and apply the ideas of teacher research. For prospective teacher researchers, a badge or series of badges might function much in the same way as Pac-Man uses power pellets, or Sonic uses rings, or Mario gold coins. The badge serves not just as a carrot or a prize, but as a map.

We propose that within teacher research there are at least five specific skills that might benefit from badging:

1. Asking thoughtful questions
2. Intentional Data Collection
3. Systematic Data Analysis
4. Publishing Findings
5. Improving Instructional Practice

By providing teachers with a structure for exploring teacher action research with badging, we provide teacher-researchers with a map for using teacher inquiry to improve practice. Since professional development structures in schools are not designed to support teacher action research, we believe that a badging system could help teachers use their own more flexible prep periods or team and department to make progress towards these goals. In total, the five badges would represent a sixth badged identity – that of teacher researcher.

Several organizations seem likely candidates to participate in the infrastructure to award these kinds of badges. Districts like St. Vrain could be responsible for awarding badges to their own faculty who participate in projects like the DLC professional development program. Consultants or other professional development organizations, such as those providing training on the DataWise method, would also likely be willing to serve as distribution nodes in a badge network.

2. Teacher Researcher Badges as Signals to Organizations

All learning organizations need more thoughtful, reflective practitioners who carefully study their own practice. Teacher Research Badges can serve to signal to organizations the presence of these teacher researchers in the organization or within the larger community granular detail about the kinds of professional learning that teachers have explored, and are much better suited to helping teachers spotlight their teacher action research.

Moreover, Teacher Researcher Badges could be used to build bridges across districts and demonstrate a national or international “teacher researcher community,” one where teacher researchers could discover and support one another.

The democratization of education reform requires that teachers and students are engaged and informed voices for the practices, habits, and mindsets that are essential to an informed citizenry. Teacher research is a powerful force for institutional subversion that can lead to a better learning environment and experiences for all. Badges that help to cultivate and mentor the next generations of institutional subverters can lead to thoughtful and inquiry-grounded innovation that can be nurtured through an organization and shared beyond.

The Podcast: A Culture of Inquiry?

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Bud Hunt

In this edition of the podcast, I explore some of my frustrations lately regarding some pushback I’m seeing as I facilitate some teacher research in my school district. I also wander through some first draft thinking on why that pushback exists.

I welcome your comments and suggestions, as always.

Direct Link to Audio

#dml2012: (Not Accepted.)^3 But I Still Like It.

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Bud Hunt

Last night, I got word that my proposal for the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference was not accepted. While I am a bit disappointed that the session wasn’t accepted, I know I’m in good company – according to my rejection notice¹, they have a 30% acceptance rate, so lots of good stuff got left behind. I suspect what made it in will be pretty interesting. But I liked the language of the proposal, and thought it might be of interest to others, so I’m posting it below exactly as I submitted it.

Practitioner Inquiry in the Digital Learning Collaborative: Teacher Research for Reform from Within

Educational reform efforts are often conducted on schools and teachers, rather than with and through them. Teachers are asked to conduct scripted lessons nested within scripted curriculum. Too often, genuine inquiry, an essential skill and mindset for students and teachers, is given lipservice rather than real attention and focus in the classroom.

In at attempt to change this dynamic while also creating a new way of thinking about teaching with technology, the St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado created the Digital Learning Collaborative in the Fall of 2009. The DLC is an attempt to introduce intentional institutional subversion through a model that recenters teachers as both learners and researchers. With their students as partners, teachers in the DLC engage in a two-year professional development program. In year one, teachers are encouraged to explore, in small teams, technologies that they are curious about in an attempt to better understand them. In year two, they bring those technologies into their classrooms and use a teacher research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, _Inquiry as Stance_, 2009) model to explore the impact of that technology on student achievement. With students as partners in this inquiry, teachers in the DLC have explored the effects of computerized assessment, the use of iPods as visual vocabulary tools, and online networking and writing environments, among others. Through a partnership with the Colorado State University Writing Project, and informed by the teacher inquiry work of the National Writing Project, these teacher researchers in the DLC are emerging as experts in residence in their schools, not as outsiders, but as insiders invested in the schools and students they serve. The DLC by design allows for the research of its members to spread throughout the district and, through the use of the Web, beyond.

In this workshop, we will explore the DLC model, as well as engage participants in an exploration of the inquiry produced in projects like these. We will also explore the opportunities and challenges that such a model for professional development presents and consider the impact practitioner inquiry, and also intentional institutional subversion can have on an organization. Participants will leave with a better understanding of how teacher research, and teacher researchers, have much to offer conversations on education reform while they are working to improve their practice. Participants will also consider the implications of teacher research on a school through some scenario explorations, and explore how teachers in the DLC can become colleagues from a distance as the power of the Internet can bring us into each others’ inquiry work as partners and responders.

The democratization of education reform requires that teachers and students are engaged and informed voices for the practices, habits, and mindsets that are essential to an informed citizenry. Teacher research is a powerful force for institutional subversion that can lead to a better learning environment and experiences for all. Through the DLC, and groups like it, thoughtful and inquiry-grounded innovation can be nurtured through an organization and shared beyond.

Which I got three times, I’m guessing due to a glitch somewhere. That stung a bit. [↩]

Getting Unstuck

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I had a productive phone conversation yesterday with a colleague in the district. She’s on one of our DLC teams and is a fine and thoughtful preschool teacher, the kind of teacher I want for my children, and she wanted to talk through some of her ideas for the teacher research project that she’s working on. It’s “due” in the Spring, and she’s having trouble coming up with a good idea for her research.

Actually, that’s not true.

Her “problem” is that she has several really good and interesting areas where she might turn her attention and skills as a teacher researcher, but all of them are appealing to her. She talked through three ideas that sounded fairly fleshed out and interesting, and two or three more that might workout, but are less developed. I wanted her to tackle all of them. And I think she did, too. But she was stuck because, really, she could ultimately only spend the time and energy on one of them.

I think she mostly needed to say that out loud, and to have me reinforce it. I look forward to the one she picks.

It came up in the conversation that she’d noticed that I was stuck lately in my own writing and exploration, as you might have noticed, too, Dear Reader. It’s been rather quiet here on the blog, and all the other spaces where I’m writing in public lately. It’s been rather quiet in the spaces where I write for just me, too.

This fall’s been a busy one, and I’ve had a pretty full plate. But that’s not really why I’ve been quiet. See, I’ve been stuck, too.

Maybe I’ve been distracted by all stuff I’ve been doing to see what it is that was worth doing, or maybe it’s that I’m just tired. Or maybe it’s just that time of year for me, a time of quiet.

Or maybe, on my worst days perhaps certainly, I’m losing my way. Maybe I’m losing hope. But I try to work through that. Being without hope, in the long term, isn’t a productive place to be.

I gave that teacher a little suggestion as we ended our conversation yesterday, and I’m thinking I might take my own advice. She was having trouble getting started because she didn’t know what project to choose. I’m stuck because I don’t know where I want to go next, either. What I suggested to her was that perhaps she might start writing her way through her topics and questions, and that, along the way, she might discover what it was that was worth her doing and seeing through. I know that’s helped me in the past, and, in fact, is pretty much why I write in spaces like this.

She responded that she might not know who’d want to read about that, or if what she’d be writing about would be obvious to everyone else¹.

That pushed me to one more suggestion. I’m certainly interested in what she’s up to, and I’d like to hear from her when she thinks she’s something to say. So, I told her, write to me. Just do it in public. She’s going to try.

And that helped. Both her and me. I think.

I forgot for a while. One of the ways that I’ve always gotten myself unstuck is to try to write with one person in mind. Writing for one person is better than writing for a universe of people. Writing for one person might make sense.²
So I’m writing today for just one or two people that might be interested in this update. And I’m going to try to come to the blog for a while with one or two people in mind and see where that gets me.

Because, for so many reasons, I can’t stay stuck for long. Just can’t. So maybe this will help.

It’s certainly worth a try.

In her case, as in most cases, that’s certainly not true. She has things to say that no one else can. I bet you do, too. [↩]
When I wrote music, something I wish I were doing more of, and have been thinking about starting again lately, I found that the best songs I had within me were written in the second person. Maybe there’s something to that here, or at least right now. Or maybe this is a self-indulgent post. For the moment, to get unstuck, I’m quite content whichever it happens to be. [↩]

We Didn’t Choose the Title

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I’m pleased to share with you that a piece that Michelle and I wrote about our work to create our school district’s Digital Learning Collaborative is in this month’s Journal of Staff Development. Here’s a copy of the article, called “Teaching 2.0: Teams Keep Teachers and Students Plugged Into Technology.”

I think it’s a good overview of the work that we’re up to here. We would love to know about intersections with your work.

Wait, I Wrote a Thesis?

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Bud Hunt

Earlier today, I received final approval of the final draft of my thesis, “Wait, Am I Blogging?”: An Examination of School-Sponsored Online Writing Spaces, which I defended back in October.

Successfully¹.

So. I’ll have a Master of Arts after graduation in December. I started graduate school in the Fall of 2001. Just finished. It was a good trip, with plenty of side trips and time off the trail.

This process has reminded me that, as with most of the writing I do, when the text is “finished,” meaning it’s time to hand it in or pass it along or hit “submit,” the value in the work is the process more often than the words that process leaves behind.

That said, several folks along the way said they might like to see the finished project. So here you go. Thanks, Internet Friends, for all your help and support.

Seriously.

With distinction, according to my committee. I was honored. Still am. [↩]

When Badges Backfire

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Bud Hunt

One of several things that worries me about the DML focus on badges is that it’s entirely possible that a badge will backfire. Badly.

If a badge’s purpose is to motivate folks who are doing interesting work on the fringe of school or teaching and learning, well, that’s very tricky business for a couple of reasons.

It’s possible, likely even, that the folks already doing the work on the fringe don’t need the motivation. They are, of course, already doing the work. And the institutionalization of the fringe work may well kill the work that you were trying to cultivate. It might be that the fringe was what made the work, ahem, work.

And so the badge saps the motivation from those who were already motivated and kills the thing they were motivated to do before the badge came along. That’s before it may, or likely may not, bring new folks to the work to witness its horrible death¹.

That wouldn’t really help.

But, because I believe badges are here to stay, and they’ll likely be with us for some time, and I hope in my better moments that my cynical self is ultimately wrong about them, then it makes sense to take advantage of the opportunity. The trick, in supporting badges, then, is to think about badges that wouldn’t actually be motivational enough to start folks doing the work, but would be handy to have for other reasons. Credentialing, perhaps, or community discovery. And you’d want to focus those badges on work that can live in the mainstream, and won’t die when brought from the fringe.

If you’re counting on a badge to serve as a motivator, a reason to get students into the game, then I’m thinking you’re miscounting. But, if you’re wanting to use a badge much in the same way as Pac-Man uses power pellets, or Sonic uses rings, or Mario gold coins, then you may well be on to something. Don’t let the badge be the carrot. Let it serve as a map or a pointer. Don’t let the badge sell the game – but let it add to the gameplay.²

And make sure that the organizations that are supporting the badges are the ones that you want pointing the way.

In my next post, I’m going to lay out why I believe that the National Writing Project, or some organization like them, should be pushing hard to propose a teacher inquiry or practitioner research badge. They’re they right people to do so, and teacher research is certainly worth of more attention in our schools. And teacher researchers could use tools like badges to help them find one another.

But that’s not the best reason to badge teacher researchers. I’ll tell you about that in the next post.

In the meantime, what other stuff might you add to the list of useful badges?

I recognize this is a cynical-sounding viewpoint. I would enjoy being proven wrong here. [↩]
I also recognize that using a game metaphor here might be a bad idea – because plenty of the folks who are eager to see badges in play would also like to turn school into a big game. That school, in many ways, already is a big game, just not a very engaging one, is another conversation for a different day. [↩]

Ruminations on Implications: Notes from the Thesis

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Bud Hunt

I’m taking a break from writing up the implications portion of my thesis by coming over here to write some more. I’m beginning to get to the place in my research that I have some definite things to say about what I found out. But I’m having some trouble saying them. Not because I know what they are – but, I think, because of what I’m using to write. Word is not where I go to think. It’s where I go to comply. When I need to think about something, I come here, to a WordPress window in my browser¹.

So maybe I’ll just try to do a little bit of freewriting here and see how it goes. Here’s what I think I know right now as it relates to my research.

To start with, here are my research questions:

What does reading and writing for school-related purposes look like in school-sponsored online writing spaces?
Who is doing the writing in these spaces? The reading?
Are the new tools and affordances of online digital writing, tools like hyperlinks, and affordances like immediate publication and world-wide audience, a factor in these spaces? If so, how?

While it’s certainly not a definitive collection of all the writing that’s happening in my school district, I’m going to take a guess and say that the three weeks of blog posts from the beginning of this school year that I’ve looked at in the course of my study are a good-sized sample of the public writing happening in my school district.

And, to start with, there’s just not enough of it. In three weeks, I can count on both hands the number of classrooms doing public writing in this space. And that leaves me with three fingers left to count other things.

Are students and teachers blogging or writing online² in other spaces? Certainly. One of the limitations of my study, one that I knew would be a problem for some of what I was wondering about, was that I am limited to public stuff. If I wanted a fuller picture of what the writing that’s happening online in my school district looks like, I need to interrogate our district’s Moodle. I need to peer into our district implementation of Google Docs. On Thursday, a teacher in our district started sharing a Google Docs collection with me from one of his classes. He was excited about the number of texts they were producing together. I’ve not yet opened the folder – but I’ve watched a hundred or so documents enter into my document list. Sometimes in real time, I’ve seen them drop into place.

Writing is happening. But why not here?³

Here’s what I know about the writiing that I am seeing:

Students and teachers aren’t talking to each other, for the most part, via the blog engine. I suspect they are talking in class, but they’re not writing back and forth in these spaces. Three quarters of the posts I saw during the period of the study contained no comments. Of the ones that held comments, only another large handful could be considered any sort of conversation – back and forth between the author of the post and the commenter(s). If these students are writing because they expect an audience, well, then they’re still waiting.
Because no one’s responding, there’s a sense that no one’s reading. Multiple times, I saw little snippets of text, clearly put up as tests, or left behind as mistakes, that weren’t taken down or adjusted. Why bother, if no one’s looking – or it doesn’t seem like anyone is?
The kind of writing that’s being asked of students in these spaces? Well, it’s interesting – I can break it down into three types – daily summaries, written collectively by elementary school classes; reflective essays about various topics; and responses to teacher questions. Lots of it is writing that doesn’t require a blog. And it’s writing that involves very, very, very little source material. Very few quotes. Very few links. And the links, when they’re present, are not embedded in the text. They lie naked and open in the text. And that seems problematic to me⁴
The writing that staff are doing is a little bit better⁵ – like students, they’re writing reflective essays, and sharing lots of newslettery information. But I can’t be sure, from this data set, if the folks they want to reach are being reached through this vehicle.

In short, the blog engine seems to me, in this data set, at least, an ~~utter failure~~ underutilized tool.

And perhaps that’s an okay place to stop for right this moment.

And, yeah, I suppose that means that I’ve a significant bias about blogs and the power of blogging that, if I haven’t yet, I need to be sure to disclose somewhere in the thesis. [↩]
Oddly, in my world, and perhaps in yours, the word “blogging” has come to mean anything written in a Web browser that isn’t an email, no matter where it ends up. Isn’t that interesting? I might be a blog snob, but that bugs me. And it probably shouldn’t. It’s less of a problem for me than it used to be – I don’t correct people now when they say that. I used to. [↩]
That’s not one of my research questions. So what? [↩]
But, again, I may well be a blog snob. But if the potential of the “writing of the 21st Century” is that it happens online and organically and is connected to other texts and blah blah blah – suppose it’s not. Is that *bad* or *problematic* or just unfortunate? Or is it just so? As I’m in the middle of arguing that we need to make sure students have the tools to do this sort of work, a body of data that suggests, nah, it’s not so important,” is a little bit problematic. [↩]
Oops – judgement again. Might need a better word than, ahem, “better.” [↩]

Bud the Teacher

Inquiry & Reflection for Better Learning

Category Archives: Inquiry