CASTL Application Question #3

3) How do you plan to conduct your investigation? What sources of evidence do you plan to examine? What methods will you employ to gather and make sense of this evidence?

Sources of Evidence
Thus far during the study we have been using:

* weekly responses (by our students and by the two instructors) to a modified version of Stephen Brookfield's "Critical Incident Questionnaire" (CIQ)

* periodic "meta-reflections" written by the two instructors about our own CIQ responses and their relationship to the ongoing teaching and learning experiences in our courses

* students' learning portfolios, with an accompanying reflective essay, completed at mid-term and at the end of the semester

Methods for Examining the Evidence
To process the CIQs, we are compiling periodic summaries of student responses to identify trends and other potentially useful insights. So far, we have been mainly relying on our meta-reflections as a way to examine our own responses.

In an attempt to better understand the relationship between critical reflection done by both students and teachers, we have been experimenting with an extended version of Schon's categories for critical reflection. In clarifying those categories we are trying to determine a way to more precisely name the kinds of critical reflection strategies that occur within a teaching and learning experience so that we can better observe and guide our students (and ourselves) as we dig into the content of our courses. We plan to apply those categories to the portfolios--especially the reflective essays accompanying the portfolios--to see whether we can identify patterns of meaning-making that somehow reflect the Schonian categories (or whether we need to invent new categories to explain that is happening and to study it further).