During our meeting we decided to assign ourselves some rudimentary homework from Cresswell, as a way to downshift and explore our research project more methodically. Here's my homework suggestion: Let's both agree to finish re-reading Chapter 1 and then do the following:
First, let's do Cresswell's writing exercise #2 on pg. 24 (using our current project as the topic).
Next, let's locate a journal article or chapter that seems somehow kindred or comparable to our own project and post the cite to our blog. (Realistically, I don't think we have time to do a written review of its methods by next week. And we did a similar exercise once with that Smith article. But it seems to me worthwhile to keep our eyes open for an alternative model again.)
Finally, I have a procedural question to ask re: our use of the CIQ, so I'll post that separately for us to discuss before we distribute next week's CIQs to our students.
Current Questions
- What kinds of reflective techniques do experienced teachers use as they engage in formative assessment and response? (very connected to, an extension of our Reflections article and therefore using Schon's notion of the reflective practitioner, theories of reflection and knowledge building--what theories specifically?)
- What kinds of reflective moves do students typically use when asked to think about their learning? (very connected to, an extension of our Reflections article and therefore using Schon's notion of the reflective practitioner, theories of reflection and knowledge building--what theories specifically?)
- What does reflective growth look like in students over the course of a semester?
- In what ways does positionality emerge in formative assessment and how might we productively respond to positional statements? (standpoint theory, whiteliness, positionality theory, feminism?)
- How does affect emerge in formative assessment, both on the part of teachers and of students and what role does the formative assessment tool seem to play in addressing affective responses? (Davidson's interactionist theory? critical pedagogy? feminist theory?)
- What are the roles of regular response in the classroom (from teacher to student and student to teacher)? I'm suddenly struck by the letters Frye used to write to his students. I never thought of them as formative assessment, but in small ways they were like the CIQs but less anonymous. (a wide range of rhetorical or communication theories might be applied here, but which?)
- In what observable (i.e., assess-able) ways does critical reflection contribute to a student's mastery of academic content within an academic term?
- In what observable (i.e., assess-able) ways does critical reflection contribute to a student's accomplishment of trans- or extra-academic learning objectives (such as civic awareness in a service learning course) within an academic term?
- In what ways is the writing process itself distinctively helpful (or unhelpful) for critical reflection? (I suppose what I'm getting at here is that our use of the CIQ assumes that critical reflection is done through reflective writing. It may be beyond the scope of our current research to incorporate other reflective tools--such as drawing or other visual media--yet our decision to add the portfolio to our research project will inevitably lead to some visual expression of learning. Should we go ahead and acknowledge that somehow in our formulation of research questions?)
- What kinds of reflective responses benefit from the relatively spontaneous nature (and limited timeframe) of the CIQ? Or perhaps:
- What kinds of interpretive data can be gleaned from the CIQ, given its relative spontaneity? (What I'm straining for here is a way to determine what we can really do with those responses instead of bemoaning their superficiality.)
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