Collablogger

ISHR ideas

2010-04-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

What's important about Fauset for the understanding of the History of Rhetoric?

Perhaps Fauset was not in any given rhetorical act doing anything radically out of the norm for African American uplift rhetoric. What seems unique about her upon a little bit of reflection is her rhetorical flexibility and her wide ranging spheres of influence. Is it important that any one person embody all pieces of a movement? I don't know. But she was at the literary vanguard, making many of the literary accomplishments of the HR possible. She was participating in the politics of respectability. She was a member of the Talented Tenth. She taught in school and through Crisis as, in Ida B. Wells' terms "good newspapers entering regularly the homes of our people in every state could do more to bring about [justice] than any agency . . . they would be the teachers to those who had been deprived of school advantages" (1893). She spoke publicly, recorded major race rights events journalistically. Perhaps the title could be "A Promiscuous Rhetoric: Jessie Redmon Fauset's Rhetorical Fight for Uplift on All Fronts"

Perhaps I could explore this as evidence that she embraced propaganda: get into people's homes and alter minds. Yet she didn't have much access to white minds. Hmm.

Overlaying your responses with additional specs

2008-02-01T08:19:00.001-08:00

Take a topic that you would like to study, and, using the four combinations of knowledge claims, strategies of inquiry,and methods in Figure 1.2, discuss how the topic might be studied using each of the combinations.

[Some of] Our Research Questions:

- What common stasis points (stopping points or points of critical tension) do students identify when they reflect on their learning process in the weekly CIQ (a formative assessment tool)?

- Upon recognizing and naming these patterns, how can instructors use them to clarify and improve “critically reflective” learning?

Quantitative Research:
We could set up an experiment in which we had a very tightly controlled task (I'm thinking of something like having all of the students do a basic rhetorical analysis of a common text). In one class we would use the CIQ throughout the process of teaching and helping the students complete the tightly controlled task. The other class would be the control group and the teacher would have to be different because she might bring in her knowledge from the other group's CIQs. Then, we would compare both the process and the outcome differences. Perhaps this experiment might involve video taping the classes for that small segment of the course, as well.

So our operating hypotheses for the above scenario include:
- Students using the CIQ will discuss their learning process about the tightly controlled task (e.g., the rhetorical analysis) in their CIQs.
- Students will experience stasis points.
- Upon examining the data (i.e., the CIQs) the instructor will be able to identify some patterns and/or addressable insights regarding the students' learning processes.
- Instructors employing the CIQ-analysis method described above will in some way be able to guide her students through the task more effectively.
- Evidence of this effectiveness will be found in the quality of the completed task (e.g., the rhetorical analysis).
- Evidence of improvements in self-conscious/critically reflective approaches to the task will be found somewhere also? (Perhaps in an additional artifact requested of both classes?)

Qualitative research:
What we're planning to do: continuing collecting the CIQs weekly, use grounded theory to try to develop categories for the types of reflection we see emerging in both teacher and student responses. Develop a theory of the range of responses possible and think about potential methods for moving students and teachers deeper into reflective practice.

Here's how we've explained our grounded theory so far:

The "theory" we are seeking might be better described as a "vocabulary"; i.e., we're trying to establish a precise set of terms that describe the moves students make (and see themselves making) as learners. Beyond the emergent categories, we will refine our understandings of the differences between reflection and critical reflection.

Cresswell combines constructivist knowledge claims with ethnography and discusses this approach in terms of "identifying a culture-sharing group and studying how it developed shared patterns of behavior over time" (21), which reminds me to pause and perhaps consider how we're identifying the "shared culture" of our participants. These are undergraduate writing students . . . what other qualities constitute their "shared culture"? And for the purposes of our study, what attributes are most important? For example, I'll go out on a limb, here, and assume that your students, like mine, are mostly Caucasian. But our study isn't about "Caucasian learning styles" or some such. (I really don't want to get all "Bell-Curvey" here--egads! So I'm wondering whether we're proposing that our students' presence in our undergraduate writing classes constitutes a "shared culture." I suppose this is what nearly all qualitative composition pedagogy studies assume. So maybe this questioning isn't overly important. Nonetheless, since we're deadline in some respects with cognition and problem-solving I'm tempted to at least pause before confidently asserting that traceable patterns among our undergraduate writing students are representative of patterns to be found among those in classes elsewhere.

Next, Cresswell combines participatory knowledge claims with narrative design and open-ended interviewing. Participatory knowledge claims is closest to our approach. Cresswell's example (it's weirdly formatted as a summary of all those approaches) regards studying oppression. I'm unable to extract any new, interesting nuggets at this point. I'm uninterested in explicating "oppression" in our use of CIQs. I get it. Don't feel like going there would be productiive right now.

Mixed Methods:
I suspect a sequential method might be best for us. Once we get through the qualitative stage and have some categories, we might be able to set up an experiment testing the methods we've developed for developing student-teacher reflection. This makes sense to me, too, in the sense that grounded theory doesn't seem like a good fit for a concurrent qualitative study, in which, presumably, you'd have to really know what you were looking for.

Transformative procedures might have been a possibility if we were planning on applying a particular theory from the beginning; for instance, if we had decided to do a positionality study, we might have been able to take a single theory and do both a qualitative and quantitative approach.

Yes, returning to our questions:

- What common stasis points (stopping points or points of critical tension) do students identify when they reflect on their learning process in the weekly CIQ (a formative assessment tool)?

- Upon recognizing and naming these patterns, how can instructors use them to clarify and improve “critically reflective” learning?

. . . we're ultimately seeking a way to generalize our results to a larger population of students and teachers. The terminology itself (whatever categories we're able to identify) will be less important than the circumstances each term describes, and then the instructor's ability to name it and engage it with her students.

Cresswell's writing exercise #2 on pg. 24 (using our current project as the topic).

2008-01-25T10:34:00.000-08:00

Take a topic that you would like to study, and, using the four combinations of knowledge claims, strategies of inquiry,and methods in Figure 1.2, discuss how the topic might be studied using each of the combinations.

Quant research:
We could set up an experiment in which we had a very tightly controlled task (I'm thinking of something like having all of the students do a basic rhetorical analysis of a common text). In one class we would use the CIQ throughout the process of teaching and helping the students complete the tightly controlled task. The other class would be the control group and the teacher would have to be different because she might bring in her knowledge from the other group's CIQs. Then, we would compare both the process and the outcome differences. Perhaps this experiment might involve video taping the classes for that small segment of the course, as well.We'd want to both watch for apparent stasis points and see how students identify them. This would allow us to talk about how different our perceptions of stases are from their perceptions.

Qualitative research: (constructivist)
What we're planning to do: continuing collecting the CIQs weekly, use grounded theory to try to develop categories for the types of stasis points we see emerging in both teacher and student responses. Develop a theory of the range of responses possible and think about potential methods for moving students and teachers deeper into reflective practice and beyond a variety of stases.

Qualitative research: (emancipatory)
If we were looking to see in what ways oppression plays a role in the development of stasis points in the classroom, we would almost certainly have to have an outsider conduct the interviews. An unbiased interviewer, like, perhaps, my research assistant Nurjahan, would have to conduct individual interviews with students, using open-ended questions. But I think this approach would be almost impossible, unless we really didn't look at the data until after our students were pretty far away from our course and not planning on ever taking a course from us again. I just don't see this method working for our pedagogical study. It would be better if we weren't study teachers and students.

Mixed Methods:
I suspect a sequential method might be best for us. Once we get through the qualitative stage and have some categories, we might be able to set up an experiment testing the methods we've developed for developing student-teacher reflection. This makes sense to me, too, in the sense that grounded theory doesn't seem like a good fit for a concurrent qualitative study, in which, presumably, you'd have to really know what you were looking for.

Transformative procedures might have been a possibility if we were planning on applying a particular theory from the beginning; for instance, if we had decided to do a positionality study, we might have been able to take a single theory and do both a qualitative and quantitative approach.

I could also see doing two qualitative approaches to answer our question: What common stasis points (stopping points or points of critical tension) do students identify when they reflect on their learning process in the weekly CIQ (a formative assessment tool)? Upon recognizing and naming these patterns, how can instructors use them to clarify and improve “critically reflective” learning?

We could use grounded theory first and then surveys to see if students self-identify which kinds of stases they feel most often and which they feel are most difficult to overcome, for instance.

Wee change to the CIQ document

2008-01-25T10:00:00.001-08:00

I've decided to write in the word "Explain" at the end of question #4 to see if we can get more juice from that question. Are you OK with that?

(Here's the wording:
What material you read, gathered for a project, or discussed in class this week engaged your thinking most? Explain.)

Since I've already photocopied a zillion forms for this semester I'll ask them to write the word "Explain" there on their sheets each time I distribute them and hopefully that will further reinforce my request for more info there.

--> Another option might be: And how so? Do you like that better than "Explain."?

CIQ procedure

2008-01-25T09:47:00.000-08:00

Here's a sample procedure to discuss:

(1) We each distribute the CIQ during the final 10 minutes of the final class of the week.
--> For me this would be Thursday of my T/Th class.
--> Question: Do we want to make this the final 10 minutes, or do we want to make it something like 15 and reserve the final 5 minutes for closing announcements or some such--the idea being to insert some sort of closing ritual after the CIQ and thereby make it less likely that the CIQ will be the exit door to class.

Perhaps it's as simple as saying something like: To try to ensure that I don't shortchange the CIQ time and we don't have to rush through it, I'll try to stop fifteen minutes before the end of the class, hand out the forms, we'll all write, and then we'll do final announcements in the last three to five minutes of class.

(2) Before distributing the CIQ we ask the students to recollect, aloud, what we did this week.

I had gone to the reminder method because I see it as pedagogically helpful on some level. To be reminded is to move out of the present moment. Otherwise we do get too many responses about the current class (which will continue to happen to a certain extent, anyway). However, I have done both the oral reminder and, in the last class, I just had a list of items up on the computer. You're right that, to a degree, the reminding creates the categories in their minds, categories of activities, anyway, and if we type it as i did last week, our language is likely to dictate, so I think I'm inclined away from that method. This is complicated because we want to study their language for this first study, so I think if we do have reminders, they should come from the students.

I think we should do the oral reminder method, asking students to recollect aloud.

Revision to #3

2008-01-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

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?

Our Approach to this Study
We have adopted a "grounded theory" approach to qualitative research, which Strauss & Corbin define as one that entails using multiple stages of data collection in order to derive a general theory that explains "a process, action, or interaction grounded in the views of participants in a study." The "theory" we are seeking might be better described as a "vocabulary"; i.e., we're trying to establish a precise set of terms that describe the moves students make (and see themselves making) as learners in our courses.

Sources of Evidence
We are collecting data from multiple sections of undergraduate research and writing courses taught by Drs. Hessler and Taggart at Oklahoma City University and at North Dakota State University. Our primary tool has been a modified version of Brookfield's "Critical Incident Questionnaire" (CIQ), completed by our students (and ourselves) each week, reporting specific moments of engagement and disengagement with the work of the course. We have been gathering these responses for over two years.

Additionally, as of spring 2008 we are asking students to contribute their Learning Portfolios to our study--in which students reflect on the processes and products of their work.

Methods for Examining the Evidence
As part of our ongoing pedagogy, we periodically summarize CIQ trends and discuss them with our students in class. For the larger research study, we hope to trace patterns among the student responses--common ways that students describe their experiences of problem-solving during our courses. For us, "problem-solving" includes a wide range of activities, from confronting an unfamiliar or frustrating concept to overcoming interpersonal conflicts as they collaborate within a research team. After categorizing and naming these strategies, we will consult with students for their assistance in (a) clarifying and employing our shared vocabulary for discussing the learning process, and (b) continuing to fine-tune our reflective-writing tools to help students to more clearly articulate their experiences.

At this point, we are still considering options for using the portfolios to supplement the data gathered from the CIQs--and hope to consult the CASTL mentors for their recommendations.

New Version of 2

2008-01-21T11:43:00.001-08:00

To apply to be a Scholar, please describe your SoTL work-in-progress in 750 to 1,250 words, by responding to the following five questions:

1) What is the central question, issue, or problem you plan to explore in your proposed work?

What common stasis points seem to emerge in the weekly CIQ (a formative assessment tool), and how can teachers begin to use a recognition of these patterns to engage in candid and productive dialogue and interaction with students about course goals, content, and approaches?

2) Why is your central question, issue, or problem important to you and to others who might benefit from or build on your findings? Please note that the goal of the scholarship of teaching and learning is not simply to improve your own teaching, but also to contribute to the practice and profession of teaching more broadly.

Reflection and critical reflection are catch words in education generally. But we know too little about how teachers and students create, interpret, and interact through reflection generally and specifically through the kinds of on-the-spot reflections that emerge in quick formative assessments like the one we use in this study. We know too little about the differences between reflection and critical reflection and too little about how to move students from basic reflection to strategic problem solving. If teachers can come to recognize the common moves of on-the-spot reflection/reactions to pedagogical approaches and content and can start to see patterns in student-teacher action and reaction, we can better respond to these reflections and can more fully intervene in students’ varied learning paths.

Nuggets from our discussion: re benefits of CIQ research

2008-01-18T14:01:00.000-08:00

How does this relate to fostering a mindset of critically reflective work?

It asks us all as users of the CIQ to work to bring things that have past into the present moment for our consideration.

Potential article title: Bullshit and Busywork: Naming Student Stasis Points

We both seem to be interested in figuring out how to accomplish a more authentic dialogue about what's working in class as a way to improve, among other things, our ability to challenge students appropriately and to get them to really understand the value of what we're asking them to do (an in exchange so they can give us a sense of whether we need to modify what we're asking them to do in order for it to be more valuable)

And to be able to enter the conversation where students are inclined to write us off and lump our approaches under a static negative category like bullshit or busywork

CASTL Application Questions #4 & 5

2008-01-18T08:57:00.001-08:00

4) How do you plan to make your work available to others in ways that facilitate scholarly critique and review, and that contribute to thought and practice beyond the local?

We see several avenues for publishing and presenting the results of our research. We will submit a conference presentation proposal this spring, prior to the CASTL workshop, so we might begin to present the results next spring (2009) at the major conference in our field: the Conference on College Composition and Communication. While developing the presentation, we will draft with the journal College Composition and Communication (CCC), the pedagogically oriented major journal in our field, in mind. CCC is a strong venue for this sort of study because its focus is on teaching writing and using writing to teach and learn. Reflection has periodically been a topic of interest to this audience but much of the educational theory on the topic does not cross into our disciplinary discussions. Further, longitudinal studies of pedagogical approaches are much needed--much of the pedagogical research in our field is case study or single-classroom, single-teacher research. Should our findings prove to have broad and significant implications interdisciplinarily, we may move the work forward to a book length project and pursue a contract with a publisher such as Jossey-Bass.

5) What aspects of the design and character of this work are you not yet fully prepared to describe? What questions do you have and what do you still need to know?

While we have IRB approval for our study, have collected multiple semesters worth of data, and have honed the question and general approach we'd like to take to interpret the data, we still need to work on the details of our data analysis process, including starting to build the categories and develop a pedagogical theory for moving students from reflection to critical reflection.

CASTL Application Question #3

2008-01-18T08:25:00.001-08:00

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).

Parts 1 & 2, CASTL app

2008-01-18T08:23:00.000-08:00

1) What is the central question, issue, or problem you plan to explore in your proposed work?

Formative assessment tools are essential to understanding the cognitive and relational stops and starts of a course and its participants. We'd like to know more about the role of a particular formative assessment (and the patterns that emerge in it) in facilitating content and skills development through quick reflection, particularly as it is paired with deeper reflection in other assignments. Our linked questions, therefore, are:

What does reflective growth look like in students over the course of a semester?

In what observable (i.e., assess-able) ways does critical reflection contribute to a student's mastery of academic content within an academic term?

2) Why is your central question, issue, or problem important to you and to others who might benefit from or build on your findings? Please note that the goal of the scholarship of teaching and learning is not simply to improve your own teaching, but also to contribute to the practice and profession of teaching more broadly.

This pair of questions is important so that teachers can use and interpret formative assessments to shape reflective growth and track content learning in the fullest ways possible. Simply collecting formative assessments is not enough; they lead to complex interactions: changes in course curriculum, retreads of misunderstood content, explorations on the students' parts of what kinds of things they seem to respond to positively and negatively as patterns in their own learning style. Thus, we believe studying student and teacher responses to a formal formative assessment tool across institutions and longitudinally will help us to understand the roles formative assessment plays and the most effective ways we might, as teachers, use them when particular types of reflection emerge.

CASTL Application Questions #1 & 2

2008-01-18T08:22:00.003-08:00

To apply to be a Scholar, please describe your SoTL work-in-progress in 750 to 1,250 words, by responding to the following five questions:

1) What is the central question, issue, or problem you plan to explore in your proposed work?

What common stasis points seem to emerge in the weekly CIQ (a formative assessment tool), and how can teachers begin to use a recognition of these patterns to engage in candid and productive dialogue and interaction with students about course goals, content, and approaches?

2) Why is your central question, issue, or problem important to you and to others who might benefit from or build on your findings? Please note that the goal of the scholarship of teaching and learning is not simply to improve your own teaching, but also to contribute to the practice and profession of teaching more broadly.

Reflection is a catch word, a god term, in education generally. But we know too little about how teachers and students create, interpret, and interact through reflection generally and specifically through the kinds of on the spot reflections that emerge in quick formative assessments like the one we use in this study.

Clarifying this Semester's CIQ Procedure

2008-01-11T10:08:00.001-08:00

Hi again.

Before we distribute the CIQs next week, let's exchange a few postings here to clarify our approach--trying to be as consistent as possible.

Here's a sample procedure to discuss:

(1) We each distribute the CIQ during the final 10 minutes of the final class of the week.
--> For me this would be Thursday of my T/Th class.
--> Question: Do we want to make this the final 10 minutes, or do we want to make it something like 15 and reserve the final 5 minutes for closing announcements or some such--the idea being to insert some sort of closing ritual after the CIQ and thereby make it less likely that the CIQ will be the exit door to class; i.e., the thing everyone dashes through in order to depart class a few moments sooner. As you can already tell from my musings here, I'm inclined to insert the closing ritual at the end of class, though I'd need to figure out a way to make it not seem overly artificial.

(2) Before distributing the CIQ we ask the students to recollect, aloud, what we did this week.
--> If not, we run the risk of many people (possibly including us) forgetting what we did this week. (Which seems to often be a problem. CIQ's often reflect only something from the current day's class because we forget what happened on Monday or Tuesday. I do this too, I confess!)
--> If so, we run the risk of overly influencing what is remembered. But it seems to me some form of public recollection, even if it's just a review of our learning objectives for the week, would be helpful. And yet, to me, often my favorite "happenings" aren't the stated objectives but the unexpected conversations or examples that arise from the class itself--these may or may not be recollected by stating the objectives. Do you see where I'm heading with this, Amy? I think we need to clarify how we do our "prompt" for the CIQ, and to what extent we influence it with our own stated recollections. If we assign a student to be the prompter, then that person will influence the recollections too, which inclines me to give no prompt at all except that working with the CIQ I've found students appreciate being reminded what occurred earlier in the week.

Our Updated List of Research Questions . . . and some possible homework for us

2008-01-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

So here's where we stand--an unedited but complete list of questions we'd like to be able to answer through our research.

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.)

A question re: the CIQ and its relative spontaneity

2008-01-11T09:40:00.000-08:00

Ah . . . so our evolving discussion about the from-the-hip benefits of the CIQ could help us make peace with this tool after all. (By which I mean, alter our expectations for it.)

Here's an attempt at a research question for that:

* 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.)

Our Evolving Questions

2008-01-11T09:18:00.000-08:00

So, I'm backing up for a second, and these are questions I think we may answer through examination of our data:
* What kinds of reflective techniques do experienced teachers use as they engage in formative assessment and response?
* What kinds of reflective moves do students typically use when asked to think about their learning?
* 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?
* 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?
* 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 few irresistibly pragmatic questions arose as I read your list:

--> What classroom practices (rituals/routines?) can foster a more deliberate and unhurried space within which teachers and students can compose more richly reflective responses? (Or is there some real value in the from-the-hip CIQ responses we all dash through from time to time?) (And am I making an accurate assumption that given such a space would result in richer responses?) This is nuts and bolts stuff, but it's been a perennial challenge to our CIQ so I feel compelled to mention it.

But back to the larger question of our larger questions, here's a possible addition:

* 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?)

Matching theories to questions

2008-01-11T09:17:00.000-08:00

2. What theoretical perspective lies behind the methodology?

Questions I think we may answer through examination of our data:
* 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?)

(Re)Developing the Project

2008-01-11T08:45:00.001-08:00

Ch.1 of Cresswell is all about developing the framework of the study. Clearly we have a qualitative study on our hands, and clearly this is classroom research that is longitudinal and cross-institutional. This much we had already established from the beginning, but it doesn't hurt to say it again as we work to focus and refine the processes we put in place.

Crotty's questions, p. 4:

1. what epistemology informs the research?
* socially constructed knowledge claims are the ones we seem to be making. We believe that students come to the classroom with prior experiences that shape the types of knowledge they hold and the ways they encounter and respond to new knowledge. We believe that teachers and students together shape the knowledge building enterprise of a class. We are particularly interested, in studying reflection, in the social dynamics of knowledge creation in our classrooms, where we allow students to think about what they bring to the class and where we listen to their interests and concerns as we flexibly respond throughout the course.

Interestingly, though, I think we might also be engaging in some pragmatism in the sense that we will probably be looking into our reflection data for evidence of "what works" or what solves problems in the classroom environment.

2. What theoretical perspective lies behind the methodology?

I'm not quite ready to answer this question. I think I need to back up and list the overarching questions I think we can answer through this data and then decide theoretically what will best inform each one.

So, I'm backing up for a second, and these are questions I think we may answer through examination of our data:
* What kinds of reflective techniques do experienced teachers use as they engage in formative assessment and response?
* What kinds of reflective moves do students typically use when asked to think about their learning?
* 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?
* 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?
* 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.

accountability

2008-01-09T11:08:00.000-08:00

I quickly read an article from the journal National Civic Review today called "The Accountability Trap." It's a bit tangential from our overall focus, but it stimulated some thinking that I wanted to capture, in case it became useful to how we think about reflection, response, and the classroom "audience." The article drew on "new public management" theory, which is all about accountability to customers. The writer was exploring this notion in terms of citizens' relationships with government and she pointed out that accountability efforts of various kinds often become accountability upward rather than downward; that is, over time, systems of accountability serve the institution rather than the "client". This parallels our systems of accountability in higher education, I think. I hate the notion of students as customers or consumers for the obvious reasons, but I think in some ways what we're doing with the CIQs, and any formative assessment, really, is mitigating the upward spiral of accountability in higher education. Our SROI's (student ratings of instruction) are supposed to make us accountable, but they only marginally serve student needs. The class is over, the students moved on, and they know that it doesn't serve them well or they would invest more in it, it seems to me. So, they robotically fill out an evaluation that allows them to vent but doesn't really lead to any substantive interaction between them and the instructor. But the CIQ does open this door, does allow for some immediate accountability.

And that immediacy is part of the accountability equation. If we go back to Czichzentmihalhy's (sp?)notion of flow, we know that satisfaction in learning and other experiences often is connected to regular and immediate feedback. Great delays in the feedback reduce satisfaction in the experience. The weekly system of the CIQs helps to ensure that the students get to have their say now and we can respond soon.

Critical reading instruction

2007-11-08T16:05:00.000-08:00

Going through some old email I found a message in which you were talking about developing a critical reading task using indices and chapter inferences (see below) and that struck me as potentially interesting. I just had my literacy, culture, and identity class look at some of the books in the field in a similar way with different ends. That is, I encouraged them to look at topics in indexes and key terms in titles as potential topic starters for a casebook assignment. In my case it was an invention activity meant to give them a broader sense of what people in this field discuss, but it could be equally useful for getting students to think about the contents of a text before reading it, a prereading set of tasks. I think it would be fruitful to return to your ideas here perhaps for next semester. Thus, my inclination to post it here.

"I've decided to integrate some critical reading
instruction into this class--basically the kind of previewing stuff we taught for
NCEE (e.g., taking our main required text and breaking them into groups in a
workshoppy way and having them trace patterns/themes in the index, make inferences
about chapters, etc.). Seems like another step in our critical reflection pedagogy.

Wanna brainstorm a little about that? Maybe we could come up with a worksheet like
the one we made on critical reflection essay writing, with examples and such. Did
you have any of your NCEE stuff handy that might be adaptable?"

Practical questions about framing and venue

2007-11-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

So our next step is to apply our own categories to just this semester? Multiple semesters?

How do we want to further "frame" our article?

And where is this article headed? To Pedagogy? CCC?

Our "dilemma"

2007-11-02T10:57:00.001-07:00

If, as we explain, the frame experiment arises as our attempt to study and address a dilemma or "mess" then what dilemma(s) are we experiencing in our own community-engaged inquiry?

Here are a few that come quickly to mind:

* My attempts to foster critical reflection seem to fall flat much of the time. My students are sharp, and they like to leap from observation to interpretation or assumption very rapidly. But because they're sharp, and feel pretty sure of themselves, they're impatient with the premise that there's more to the critical reflection process than see-feel-respond zip zip zip. I'm struggling to teach this.

* I'm also less than satisfied with my own critical reflection: I'm not giving it enough time or priority, I'm not cultivating understanding with myself or following my serendiptous, associative thoughts enough.

* A related dilemma: I find my students and me focusing too much time on product and not enough on process and context. Once our community research begins we make that our priority above all--even to the point that I sometimes skip CIQs to give them more class time to collaborate.

Our purpose and frame experiment

2007-11-02T10:42:00.001-07:00

Within that context, how would we explain (1) the nature of our "frame experiment" and (2) the purposes of our research?

We are testing the theory about stasis strategies that we built based on Schon and the examples from our practitioners in the special issue of Reflections. The experiment will extend our knowledge of those strategies and both their explanatory and applied power.

The purpose of our research is thus to further develop our theory of stasis points and strategies in the writing classroom, thereby identifying productive and counterproductive practices.

What problem are we trying to solve?
What the CIQ offers us particularly is a way to think about teacher and student responses to situations together and try to identify best ways of responding and conversing together.

We want teachers, including ourselves, to be the most rhetorically savvy readers of their classroom situations and to learn to identify the most effective rhetorical responses to those situations. This takes communication between rhetor and audience, reflection on the communication. It is too easy to misread a stasis point and respond in a counterproductive way. Therein lies the problem.

" The effective professional begins by noticing a dilemma,"
Teaching is a communicative process in which it is easy to misread a stasis point or point of crisis and respond in such a way that learning is not enhanced.

"framing what he or she will consider as part of the new situation (and thereby eliminating some factors)"
The frame surrounds the courses in which we have used the CIQs: mine has primarily been English 358, a required upper division course on writing in the humanities and social sciences. We've also framed in "writing classes" as our focal points. In this first instantiation, we are directing our gaze a bit more fully toward the teacher's reflection in response to student comments and actions.

"drawing on previous knowledge and theories"
Schon, our own early stasis strategies thinking

"while adapting them to address the newness of the situation, and testing the new knowledge in action." (155)

Next Directions

2007-10-26T09:31:00.001-07:00

Next directions:

Ok, so if we just want to extend the work we did in this article, we could use the same stasis points/strategies to interpret the nature of our responses and the quantity of occurrences. How frequently are we attending to one kind of stasis point, for instance. As individual instructors do we tend toward interpreting situations in one or two ways more than others? It would certainly be useful to know if I always respond based on role frames, for instance, because I’m so interested in relationships and respond so often to students as individuals. On the one hand, this might be too self-centered to really matter in terms of the larger field. On the other hand, we can continue to suggest how our stasis strategies can be useful as lenses to turn back on our own pedagogy.

Another possibility:
based on a pattern we see in our own responses, each write (but kind of collaborate behind the scenes) an article elucidating one of our stasis strategy/point categories further. Basically, develop the theory of how each of these reflective positions in the classroom works, what benefits it affords, what its pitfalls might be.

Repertoire seems a little broad still and less defined than I would like it to be.

Defining our current "frame experiment"

2007-10-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

As we dive back into our Reflections article it seems like a good idea to pause and discuss how our research itself fits the descriptions of critically reflective practice given in the article.

For example, as part of our illustration of Shon's 'frame experiment' we say,

" The effective professional begins by noticing a dilemma, framing what he or she will con-
sider as part of the new situation (and thereby eliminating some factors),
drawing on previous knowledge and theories while adapting them to address
the newness of the situation, and testing the new knowledge in action." (155)

and later:

"We conduct research both because frame experiments did not work effectively, leaving some 'messes' to
manage (Schön, The Reflective18) that are more complex than can be addressed as we work in the
classroom or community setting, or because we hope to articulate what hap-
pened in our successful frame experiments so that others might also use our knowledge.
Reflection to develop new knowledge in and after the moment,
followed by action, combine to form a complete reflective practice." (155-56)

Within that context, how would we explain (1) the nature of our "frame experiment" and (2) the purposes of our research?

Let's get that conversation onto this blog--ideally in a more precise way than we've used during the shorthand of our e-chats.

And let's discuss it in terms of our own teaching as well as in terms of our collaborative research agenda.

Thoughts on Dialogism and Critical Reflection

2007-04-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

Here are some thoughts that have emerged for me this week regarding critical reflection, spurred by Kay Halasek's notion of pedagogy as dialogic and answerable and Dale Jacobs' discussion of critical pedagogy and hope.

Pedagogy as an answerable act
“By seeing pedagogy as an answerable act, we
1. shift the focus on pedagogy from what we do (and what our intentions are in ‘doing’ teaching the way we do) to how our teaching is received, which, in turn, allows us to examine the ethics of teaching;
2. begin to examine pedagogy as practice, pedagogy in action—not pedagogy in theory;
3. see differently the reticence, resistance, and accommodation of students;
4. enlarge the responsibilities and contributions of students to pedagogy and the successes of classroom practice.
To this final end, a pedagogy of possibility is a student-generated (nnot simply student-centered) pedagogy in which students are given and expected to bear responsibility for the construction of the classroom and its goals” (Halasek 180).

Halasek’s study is all about applying Bakhtinian theory to composition studies. If we think of the classroom in the dialogic and heteroglossic way Halasek suggests we should, the CIQs offer us a way to stimulate the dialogue, to formalize it a bit more. I don’t think as it’s written now and as students use it now that they are really engaging us in a dialogue in which they’re equally invested. Still, we are asking them to exert those reflective and dialogic muscles. We’re asking them to acknowledge connections that go beyond this class, as well.

Critical pedagogy’s take on reflection

“This point is crucial to the way we think about both untested feasibility and hope: seeing material circumstances as opportunities for alternative approaches, engaging in both individual and collective agency (enmeshed as we have seen that they are), and then critically reflecting on those actions” (Jacobs, Dale. “What’s Hope Got to Do With It?” JAC 25.4 (2005): 791)

This article is about the role of hope in a critical pedagogy. Jacobs draws on Gabriel Marcel’s Being and Having, a theological statement in the spirit of liberation theology, that suggests that hope as opposed to ambition is social, collective in nature and force. One cannot exercise hope, Marcel suggests, purely for individual ends. And if we agree with this definition of hope, that collective impulse can help to organize our critical efforts. Critical reflection in the classroom is always aimed at communal ends. To take this a step further to answer our ongoing question about critical reflection and its nature and roles in the classroom, I think we are seeing a pattern. We lament the problem of our students seemingly offering us just enough “feedback” to shape the class to meet their interests and concerns, but we believe they are not reflecting in a way that signals collective goals or larger goals. What we are trying to do, then, is develop principles and practices that will move us as a class toward more collective ends and toward a more dialogic dynamic (to, again, draw on Halasek).

I want to offer one caveat here, however. I do not draw on critical pedagogy lightly. As an early instructor I found critical pedagogy engaging, motivating, connected to my already existing beliefs and goals as an educator. However, I do not delude myself about critical pedagogy in practice. I know that I cannot escape the power and authority that comes with being a sanctioned teacher in a US classroom. This is not Brazil and is not the barrio. Also, while I think perhaps Yoon takes her critique of the rhetoric of affect in critical pedagogy a bit too far, she is right to note that affect and a sense of right and wrong hold sway in critical pedagogy discussions.

Pausing mid-plunge: A Few Preliminary Thoughts about Our Work with Brookfield's CIQ

2007-04-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

Two weeks left in the semester--that means two remaining Critical Incident Questionnaires.

Perhaps the chief benefit of this tool, so far, has been simply to establish a regular routine of weekly, anonymous feedback from students--making formative assessment a more natural part of my pedagogy. Our goal for using the CIQ has obviously been more than that, though. And, frankly, the more I think about it the less I like to discuss this tool in terms of feedback because I think I've inadvertently given my students the impression that the CIQ is mainly there to help me tailor the course to their needs and interests instead of being a tool to help them reflect on their learning processes.

When Amy and I revised the wording of the questionnaire this semester, I think we made an important step forward. The document needs to more clearly emphasize the content of the learning experience rather than principally the students "feelings" about the experience. Of course their feelings matter very much, but I think the wording of the original CIQ emphasizes feelings in a way that my students seemed to view as a gauge for moment-to-moment pleasure with the class moreso than a deeper connection to the purpose and work of the course.

As we work through the raw data of our CIQs, I hope to find clues into my own readings and misreadings of the teaching and learning process and to formulate better ways to model, teach, and reinforce critical reflection and reflexivity.

On my reading list:

Katherine Adams on the CIQ

Schon's Educating the Reflective Practitioner (I need to review this in the light of what we've been doing over the past year.)

Our article on critically reflective community-enagement pedagogy

Image source: Ruth and Dave