Monthly Archives: June 2016

Research update

This blog post will probably be of interest to maybe five other people (including my Mum) but it’s part of a process that I’ve decided on for tracking what I’m doing and maintaining some accountability, so here we are. It’s kind of the beauty of blogging – the whole “long tail” thing – that ultra-niche voices can still have a platform. (And in defense of my own posts, this will be far from the least coherent post that I have read this week)

So in my last post I mentioned that I’m putting processes and systems in place to help me work better on my PhD. (Well, my PhD proposal I should say – this has to be approved before I actually embark on the proper research itself). As I’ve mentioned, my topic is currently very broad but I expect that over the next year it will come into a much sharper focus. The absence of deadlines however has meant that I’ve felt that I’ve been drifting from one shiny topic to the next. People keep telling me that this is by far the best stage of a PhD and that this opportunity will probably never come again but there are still things that I need to get done in this time and having a clearer vision of what they are and when they should be done soothes my soul.

project plan screenshotMuch of what I’ve done is create an increasingly granular series of tasks and put them in 3 different tools – the Excel project plan, Wunderlist and Trello. In essence they are all glorified to-do lists but with varying functionality, including attaching teams/people, documents, calender items and integrating them with other productivity systems like Slack.

Managing all three seems a little like triple handling but the spreadsheet should be mainly just about denoting progress now and I like the whole-year perspective that it offers. IFTTT lets me automatically create Wunderlist tasks when I add them to a Trello card so this should also simplify matters.

TrelloScreenshot

(That’s Trello – it looks pretty plain at the moment but has given me a much needed roadmap for the different topic areas that I plan to investigate month by month)

The July topic – Universities as organisations – aligns well with both a (workplace) university strategic review as well as an upcoming ACODE University Benchmarking event that I’m hoping will offer some tangible insights into the ‘state of the actual’ in TELT practices. It also ties to the ongoing discussion/review process that I’ve been leading of ed tech and TELT in my university and the associated governance structures. (The powers that be are expecting a report with some recommendations in early August.)

wunderlist screenshot

The overall to-do list has gotten a little smaller -for now – though it needs updating and there are some ongoing tasks tied to digitising the myriad handwritten ideas and questions that come to me pretty much day and night now.

All this aside, it’s still hard not to feel that I haven’t made a lot of progress in the last few weeks – I guess it would be more accurate to say I haven’t made as much progress as I would’ve liked in terms of reading and writing things but I feel far more ready to do this in a more effective and productive way now.

On a day to day level though, the reading that I’ve been doing and the ideas that I’m starting to synthesise are really starting to feed into my professional practice and are giving me more confidence in the decisions and plans that I’m putting forward.

So let’s see how that goes.

Making a PhD plan

One of the greatest challenges of my chosen research topic (how universities can support tech enhanced learning and teaching practices) is the sheer breadth of it. Obviously this focus will narrow in time but at the moment it can sometimes feel a little overwhelming, even when I get into an interesting sub-branch.

As a result, I’ve been pretty good at gathering resources to read later and dipping into a few papers that seem particularly relevant to my work-work in the here and now. Overall however it is a very scattered approach and while some projects at work-work are helping to give me a hands on view of some of the real issues and factors that act as barriers to TELT practices in Higher Ed (so many barriers, so many dumb, needless barriers), I am keenly aware that I’m drifting a little and need to be looking more through the frame of the research proposal in the first instance.

So I spent the weekend organising my thoughts, setting some priorities and starting a plan. (I do really hope that this isn’t just a more advanced form of procrastination – it feels more than that at the very least.) I’ve been drawing my approach partially from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, which is in some ways a fancy process for making to do lists but with a little more forethought. It encourages a very large scale gathering process to begin with, capturing all of the small tasks (and larger projects which are made of many small tasks) and ideas and putting them into categories in an active storage system that you trust. (I’m using Wunderlist which I like for the interface, cross-platformness, the ability to create collections of lists and integration with browsers.

wunderlist screenshot

I’ve got tasks organised by to do today/this weekend/this week/this month as well as in a range of contextual categories. I’ve tried to estimate the time each task will take to give me a sense of how long I need to allow to get it done. I’ve ordered them to set priorities (and because some tasks are contingent on other ones).

Now it’s just a matter of doing them.

Probably the biggest thing I’d like to do is to identify 6 (or so) key topic areas to spend a month each focussing on. These may well change over time but at least it will give some much needed direction.

Writing more regular blog posts about my progress is also another must – trying to keep myself honest.

Thoughts on: Reflecting or Acting? Reflective practice and continuing professional development in UK Higher Education (Clegg, Tan and Saeidi, 2002)

Clearly one of the key ingredients in enhancing teaching practice is teacher professional development and a vital element of deriving meaning from this is reflective practice.

It is at this point however that we need to be cautious of the evangelisers of reflective practice as a global solution. “Reflecting or Acting? Reflective Practice and Continuing Professional Development in UK Higher Education” by Sue Clegg, Jon Tan and Saeideh Saeidi (2002) takes a methodical look at the use of reflection and notes that current (at the time – not sure how much they have evolved) uses of reflective practice in CPD isn’t suited to all learners and needs to be anchored in actions taken to be particularly meaningful.

Reflective practice is valued for acknowledging “the importance of artistry in teaching” (p.3), which seems even more important in 2016 than it was in 2002 with the rise of big data and analytics in education sometimes seeming determined to quantify and KPI-ify every single facet of teaching and learning. (Can you tell that I’m more of a qual than a quant?)

Clegg et al investigated the use and value of reflective practice amongst academic staff in accredited CPD between 1995-1998. In broad terms (Spoiler alert) they tied it to four types of practices/behaviours that reflected the learning preferences and teaching circumstances of the teachers. These preferences – either for ‘writerly’ reflection or not – and the circumstances (which impacted their ability to act on new teaching knowledge) had a significant part to play on how valuable reflection was to them.

The ‘action’ part is at the core of the question that Clegg et al are pursuing. They draw on Tomlinson (1999) in assuming that “the relationship between reflection and action is transparent with reflection-on-action leading to improvement and change” (p.4). This idea has been of interest to me recently because I’ve been involved with the HEA fellowship scheme at my university which appears to have a different focus, seemingly sans action. (I’ll discuss this further in future posts as engaging Fellows seems as though it is going to be an important part of my ongoing quest/research)

As for the learning preference side of the equation, one of the simultaneous strengths and failings of the widely followed reflective practice approach is the emphasis on a very ‘writerly’ style of reflection. By which the paper refers to Bleakly (2000), who has “argued for greater attention to the form of writing and a greater self-awareness of literary accomplishments of narrating and confessional.” The authors note however that “our data suggested that some practitioners fail to write or only write as a form ex post facto justification for accreditation purposes”. Which, based on the feedback from some of the participants that struggled with the writing element of the task, can be linked in part to the disciplinary orientation of the learners (i.e. quant vs qual backgrounds) and in some cases to gender-role perceptions – “the feminine reflective side as opposed to the more active masculine doing side of practice” (p.18)

These key factors allowed the authors to sort participants into four groups, based on their practices.

  • Immediate action – participants put new ideas into practice directly after the CPD workshops (and before reflection) (more often novice practitioners)
  • Immediate reflection – participants reflected on their own practices directly after CPD workshops (more often experienced practitioners) – they also found less value in the workshops  in terms of new knowledge
  • Deferred action – some participants were unable to act on knowledge gained in workshops due to organisational/time constraints (this limited their ability to reflect on the impact of new knowledge on their new actions/practices)
  • Deferred reflection – largely participants that struggled to engage with the reflection activity in its current format. Many only did it for accreditation purposes so saw little benefit in it.

Clegg et al take pains to emphasise that their research is about starting a conversation about the interrelationship between action and reflection and the need to maintain this link. They don’t draw any other conclusions but I think that even by simply looking at on-the-ground interaction with reflective practice, they have given us something to think about.

Reading this paper sparked a few random ideas for me:

  • Perhaps Design thinking might offer a way to bridge the gap between the ‘teaching as a craft’ and ‘teaching as an empirical science with hard data’ viewpoints by applying a more deliberate and structured way of thinking about pedagogy and course design
  • Are there ways that we can foster writing (and some reflection) as a part of every day ongoing CPD for academics? (Without it being seen as a burden? There probably needs to be a goal/outcome/reward that it leads to)
  • Decoupling reflection from action – particularly when action comes in the forms of making improvements to practice – gives people less to reflect on and might lead to too much navel gazing.
  • A large part of the work being done on reflective practice by one of my colleagues is focusing on the impact that it has on teacher self-efficacy. Tying it to professional recognition boosts confidence which is valuable but is there a risk that this can in turn lead to complacency or even over-estimation of one’s competence?
  • My personal philosophy when it comes to theory and practice is that none will ever hold all of the answers for all of the contexts. I believe that equipping ourselves with a toolbox of theories and practices that can be applied when needed is a more sustainable approach but I’m not sure how to describe this – one term that I’ve considered is multifocal – does this seem valid?
  • One concern that I have about this study is the large number of contextual factors that it tries to accommodate. These include : “how participants understood their activity including reflective practice, their motivations for joining the course, how they made sense of their decisions to complete or not complete, and whether they thought of this as a conscious decision” (p.7) On top of this there was the level at which the CPD was being conducted (novice teachers vs supervisors), disciplinary and gender differences as well as learning preferences. Maybe it’s enough to acknowledge these but it seems like a lot of variables.
  • Reflection shared with peers seems more valuable than simply submitted to assessors.
  • Even when reflective writing is a new, ‘out of character’ approach, it can be seen as valuable even though it can take learners time to ease into it. Supporting some warm up exercises seems like it would be important in this case.
  • It’s worth taking a harder look at exactly what forms meaningful reflections might take – is there just one ‘writerly’ way or should we support a broader range of forms of expression?
    Audio? Video? Dank memes?
    “Virtually all the descriptions of keeping a journal or gather materials together suggested that they somehow felt they had not done it properly – qualifying their descriptions in terms of things being just scrappy notes, or jottings, or disorganised files, or annotated e-mail collections. Such descriptions suggest that participants had an ideal-typical method of what reflective practice should look like. While the overt message from both courses was that there was no one format, it appears that despite that, the tacit or underlying messages surrounding the idea of reflective practice is that there is a proper way of writing and that it constitutes a Foucauldian discipline with its own rules” (p.16-17)
  • Good reflection benefits from a modest mindset: “one sort of ethos of the course is it requires you to, I don’t know, be a bit humble. It requires you to take a step back and say perhaps I’m not doing things right or am I getting things right, and throw some doubt on your mastery…” (p.17)
  • This is more of a bigger picture question for my broader research – To what extent does the disciplinary background shape the success (or orientation) of uni executives in strategic thinking – qual (humanities) vs quant (STEM)?