"The students are alive, and the purpose of education is to stimulate and guide that self-development." The corollary of this idea is that "teachers also should be alive with living thoughts."
Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, 1929, Preface, p. v Thinking about Research (an excerpt from the President's Message to Phi Delta Kappa membership May, 2018) I’m writing this report at the Jasper Park Lodge; it’s beautiful. I’m here to attend the annual ACIFA Conference (Alberta Colleges and Institutes Faculty Association). It is a nice little conference with educators from NAIT, SAIT, Lakeland College, Northern Lakes, Portage College, Medicine Hat, Red Deer College, Olds, Keyano College, Grande Prairie, and of course, NorQuest. Here we have been able to increase our understanding about student advocacy, flipped classrooms, building resiliency, sustainable curriculum, community research, accommodations, reconciliation, and mindfulness. Some of the sessions have been quite inspiring and helpful, others not so much. What is really powerful though, is the networking and sharing between instructors from across the province. The between-session conversations, the discussions during meal times and receptions, and the late-night debates over a beer or two have fostered a kinship and information exchange that benefits both the instructors and the students we serve. At the conference, I was able to attend a joint session where Business instructors from two different colleges (Sheryl Boisvert - NorQuest & Rick Robinson - Medicine Hat) worked together to conduct informal research that might inform their instructional practice. This research started with Rick asking himself: “Is my approach to teaching the most effective way to engage and support my learners?” To this point, he had been doing a fair bit of lecturing - using PowerPoints and prepared notes. So he started experimenting with active learning strategies and began soliciting feedback from his students on their level of confidence and engagement after using different approaches. He also started tracking his students’ academic results more closely, especially in response to changes in his pedagogical approach. Then, after sharing some of his observations with Sheryl, the research inquiry gained more focus and rigour. The two instructors set about teaching the same course in different ways and even had a “control group”. While one group continued to be taught using the traditional lecture method several other groups worked in a flipped environment where the students were asked to watch pre-recorded videos and read sections of the text before coming to class so that the bulk of their class time could be spent on problem-solving in small groups with the instructor moving into a facilitation role. So far the results have been encouraging; there was improved achievement and attendance in year-over-year comparisons. And now, after a year of working together, the two instructors were ready to present some of their preliminary findings. Having been involved in K-12 school improvement and post-secondary faculty development for so many years, I was already well aware of the learning potential in using active learning approaches like the flipped classroom. So, while I appreciated the sharing of practical applications and discoveries, I was most excited to hear how Rick and Sheryl felt the need to be accountable, reflective, collaborative, and strategic in their approach to teaching. They were not afraid to challenge themselves and avoid classroom complacency (things were working…students were learning) by starting on an inquiry that would eventually require a fair bit of work and introspection. And I think their students greatly benefited from the collaboration, focused inquiry, and responsive risk-taking. Now, each year our local PDK chapter seeks to highlight some of the research being done at our universities and colleges by handing out a dissertation award and/or staging a graduate student research showcase. Through these efforts we are able to keep up with, support, and disseminate information on quality research. It is important that we, as an organization, encourage research based upon sound pedagogy, clear theoretical underpinnings, rigorous inquiry, and peer-reviewed validation. But, as my two colleagues from NorQuest and Medicine Hat have shown, research does not always have to be so elaborate or academic. In fact, informal research (sometimes called action or applied research) has an advantage over academic, peer-reviewed research in that it can produce immediate impact on the classroom with the students. In this kind of research, teachers, instructors and professors are able to design very concrete, context-based inquiries and nimbly respond to emerging variables. And, there are so many opportunities to conduct informal research in our classrooms. I believe that many of our members are already conducting this kind of action research, they just need to take the extra step of documenting their question, approach, adjustments and findings so that these might be shared with other educators.
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AuthorJeff Kuntz Ph.D. ImagesExcept where indicated, images used in the blog posts are personal photos, images from NorQuest College or images from Pixabay. Pixabay is a vibrant community of creatives, sharing copyright free images, videos and music. https://pixabay.com/ Archives
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