Educating Matty

March 29th

2010-02-23T05:25:00.000-08:00

I have set my dissertation defense date. it is March 29th. The only writing I will do between now and March 14th will be on my dissertation or on grading. I hope everyone who is reading this will have a good next few weeks.

Responsive teacher professional development

2010-02-23T04:47:00.001-08:00

If we want teachers to teach in ways that are responsive to their students' ideas, we should be teaching teachers in ways that are responsive to their own ideas. so what does that look like and what is needed?
I want to figure out the literature that I need to read in order to explore this issue.

TPD that is responsive, what does that mean? To some people, it is responsive to the needs of the teacher. So what is the literature for that? Cochran-Smith's stuff about teacher communities comes to mind. So does the Tobin cogenerative dialogues come to mind. In those, the teachers have a say in the agenda and what they want to explore more deeply. Is the development work in the direction that the teacher wants or is it a mix of what the professional developer and the teacher? I am still a bit old school in this and think that as a professional developer, I have things I want my teachers to develop. Things that given the system they are currently in, they might not develop- such as particular ways of valuing the students' ideas in their course work. In any case, I think I need to check those out further and see how they speak to my question.

Okay, next possible body of literature: action research, teacher-teacher collaborative work, etc. There, the teacher definitely has full control over the direction of their own work. That is responsive in a way. How am I thinking of responsive here? Does it mean teacher having control over the agenda? I have a feeling that is not exactly what I mean.

In science learning, I think it is something along the lines of listening to students' ideas, understanding where those ideas are coming from, understanding how students are seeing the world such that those ideas are reasonable ideas, and understanding how to help them refine their ideas. In my eyes, refinement of those ideas necessarily means engagement in the practices of participating in a scientific community. In the students' case, that would mean the practices of the developing scientific community in their own classrooms. So how does this translate into teaching? What maps over and what doesn't? Well, for one thing, the teachers are not in a developing teaching community of their own classroom. They are the community (especially if we are talking about practicing teachers...new teachers may be closer to my idea of the science middle school or high school student). Also, how do we define the practices of the field? I guess the trouble here is that we have so many definitions out there, some theoretical and some already entrenched in the practices of the teachers, I don't know if we know what the practices we should be aiming for are, as a community. As a teacher educator, I have a sense of what I'd like my teachers to aim for. But that might not be what they want to aim for.

hmm...

Okay, back to my "analogy" of the science student. I think in teaching responsively to science students, a very important thing is that teachers need to be able to assess what students are doing. Assess them not in the formal large sense of quizzes, tests, or even exit cards. I mean simply on an everyday, paying attention to what students are telling you/doing right in front of you sort of way. So, how do we think about assessing teachers in teacher professional development and learning? I think that as researchers, we might implicitly do assessment of the interactions along the way- e.g. showing how conversations/activities produced are different along the way. But I think for now, I want to focus just on articles and research that talk about different kinds of measurement tools. Well, many places use pre-post tests/surveys. Some places use portfolios. Some places use a combination. the ones I know that talk about ways to assess the conversation of the TPD meetings are the teacher noticing folks. Anybody else? Is that the kind of assessment that will be most helpful for responsive teacher PD? Does that assess the in-the-moment ideas? I think it depends on what I am trying to assess for. Does this go back to what are the kinds of knowledge and skills we want to help teachers develop? Or should we be thinking about attitudes and blah blah blah. The categories depend on what we think is necessary in teaching and what we thinking teaching should look like. It also depends on how we think about teacher cognition and learning. If we think of teachers as having unified networks of beliefs or if we think of teachers as having resources that they use. And how do adult learners complicate things (adult learners as opposed to student learners).

Does this mean i have to look up literature on adult learning? Eep. But okay, this is good. I am brainstorming and just want to know the possibilities. I might decide not to read everything.

So then we do an assessment of the in-the-moment ideas of the teachers. Our response depends on how we think about what teaching should be. So this might have implications for how we train future teacher educators. ok.

Okay, so I have a start of a plan. This topic is exciting to me because I have been tossing it around in my head for the past few years. I had put it aside but it keeps coming back, so it must be something I'd want to spend some time on. That's exciting to think of my next big research agenda, now that I am coming near the end of my dissertation.

The frames are epistemological in nature

2009-05-12T10:43:00.001-07:00

The frames I look at are epistemological in nature. This is because it is about students' ideas in science.

We can look at the other frames that may be active in the interaction, e.g., the social activity of school frame. Those may (and usually do) play a role in this frame.

Or maybe the thing I am looking as is jsut the epistemological aspect of the frame that is in operation in the classroom at the moment.

One question is, what exactly is a frame? Is it something I use, as a researcher, to help me carve up the data or am I assuming an element of "reality" to the frame? Is the entire interaction contained in "one frame" and that frame has elements of different things in it to give that frame its flavor? Of is it that there are layers of frames- this would imply that the frames are like pieces of acetate that can be moved from one stack to another... this seems a lot more like Minsky than I thought.

But maybe those pieces of acetate are really small. and they come together to create a whole as the context needs. Then it isn't really like Minsky. But then again, maybe I really do mean Minsky.

Is it necessary to tightly define this just yet. What does it mean about this work if it is not yet tightly and operationally defined?

Definition of an episode?

2009-02-24T08:16:00.001-08:00

How do I define an episode?

2009-02-24T04:44:00.001-08:00

Teachers need to pay attention (Lit?)
How do we define attention? A definition in Strickland but not enough. What about attention to student ideas? What does that look like?

Teacher’s attention is influenced by the knldg and the blfs the teacher has (lit?)
The literature says the nature of these blfs and knldg and their influence on teacher’s practice is as such: (lit)

But context has an influence on attention.
How have we talked about context in blfs and knldg? Macro mostly, unitary. Speer’s work is more micro. Talk about interactive decision making here and Schoenfeld. More work needs to be done at the micro level.

The ways to think about how context influences teacher attention
School culture level (Lampert)
Activity : Chazan and Schnepp—time of year.
Herbst; Rop—type of activity

Tchr's knowledge and beliefs are rooted in the context of their (personal) practice

2008-09-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

Teachers' knowledge are practice and context related (Tobin & McRobbie 1997; Tsang, ???; and basically the folks who talk about practical and personal practical knowledge). This means the knowledge is about what goes on in specific contexts. Can we also say then that knowledge is applicable, activated or relevant to only specific contexts? I am assume that we can also say the same about beliefs (since the line between personal/practical knowledge and beliefs seems very fuzzy (Aguirre and Speer, maybe?).

How can we think about contexts in a way that is relevant to what the teachers do in the classroom as they interact with their students? What is the context to look at? I want to (will) argue that the context is what helps organize the teacher's thought process, which in turn helps them organize what they do, how they think about what's going on, what meaning they make of events, and which in turn influences the context.

In my dissertation, the context I want to look at is the interaction the teacher has with his or her students. Not only does the context influence the teacher, the teacher influences the context as well. In an interaction, the interaction is created by the participation and cognition (if you want to separate the participation from the cognition) of the interactants. How the interaction has unfolded thus far (as well as the things that led up to this interaction such as past interactions) also has an influence on the teacher's cognition.

want to give up...can't give up

2008-06-03T12:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, so am trucking along. Think I have figured out the challenge i had with D and A. The key was that she initiated and thus made a bid to frame it a certain way. Need to make sure I talk bout it as a tacit thing!

Okay, am feeling good. THen realize need to talk about the interview data too. then will need to talk about the contributions to the ways of framing so as to be able to talk about the shifts.
and then I need to do this for the two episodes of J1. sheesh! on the plus side advisor 2 thinks I don't need to do J2 but it seems silly not to do J2 if I did J1 already but it would be nice to not have to do another one. Have a feeling that I will be asked to do J2 just because folks will find it odd.

So, need to construct a good reason to include J2 at all but to not do chapter 5 and6 analysis of him.

D and A

2008-06-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

In both cases where D shifted out of the "correct" and into the "explore" it was initiated by A pushing out her idea first. She gave something for them to talk about.

frame shifts

2008-06-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

This will probably not make any sense to anyone else other than me. But I need to figure something out about my dissertation and so am using this as a dumping ground right now. So, if you are not Matty Lau nor part of her dissertation, you can stop reading now.

Okay, how do I make sense of D and his frame shifts with A? Would like to say that he is framing it in a particular way but if we want to be true to the data, he actually shifts in and out of the framing. Then whenI point that out, there is a desire to hear about "Well, why the heck does he shift in and out?" That should be part of chapter 6. But why does he shift in and out? well, I think it is because he thinks that he has gotten her into the right problem space and then they can explore. But when she says things that are not correct nor a in the allow "wrong ideas" space (which in this case, I don't really know what is and I don't think D knows what it is either), he feels the need to pull her back by telling her. I think that the correct wrong ideas are ones that can easily be changed to be the right ideas by demos or lab experiences or simple logic problems he thinks they can tackle in the confines of his class (e.g., videos, dropping things, etc). But in the end, they are ones that he knows how to confront and fix eventually. Is that how he saw G? With A, she claimed that gravity was just weird in outer space and so that is hard to deal with- is that it? I am not sure that is it either.

Okay but how does this help with Chapter 5? How do I establish what frame (or frames) he is in? How is this useful for me to talk about?

Lots of things I don't know

2008-04-07T20:04:00.001-07:00

I am working hard on my dissertation. Well, obviously not at this very moment silly! I am quite happy because I am working at the edge of my knowing; taking everything I have learned and pulling it together to create something new. Creating a new thing is fun but hard. That's because things don't always fit together right and it takes a long time (with many "do-overs"). This isn't like IKEA furniture where even if I have trouble with understanding the instructions, at least there are instructions for how to assemble the finished product (or that there is even _one_ predefined finished product). One thing I have learned as I continue working on my dissertation is that there are a lot of things out there I don't know... and that is pretty darn exciting! With so much more to understand, how could one ever get bored?

So, this blog will hopefully be my mental forays into things I haven't quite figured out yet.