Time to reflect and write

..... well, I do that every week or two really, don't I?

Today I had to bring my library books back, now my desk is half empty. For the first time I had them there in front of me for two months, and did not look at them except to go quickly through the chapter headings.  As a result I had to choose very quickly what to make note of and sacrifice the rest - that's what happens when you break your new habits.

When I got back home I was straight on to Amazon to look for some more books, but better to wait a bit - might need to see where my study takes me next year as I am still working through that.

Class on Saturday was great, a lot of insight into teaching, others thinking and a lot of laughter, that always helps the day get better. Feedback was good overall despite me giving my feedback with Page 2 first, as you couldn't really tell this week where it started and ended (and I saw that most of my paragraphs were quite self contained when I wrote it out....)

Going through the criteria for the second assignment I noticed that we are to reflect on and evaluate our learning taking per feedback into account. What I have written in my Patchwork texts is not a problem, but what I have neglected to do, is to take stock of our collaborative conversations offering insights and interpretation, that went so naturally, I better go back through this blog and see what I might have hiding as comments or noted statements. It refers mostly to the first and the third reflection, so I should be able to gather something out of my ramblings. It was all so organic I haven't consciously captured enough in my waking thoughts - so that might take some effort. Going through the Community should help as there will be some comments and queries to trigger my recollections.

So my goals for last week were all achieved and on time, yay for that, there was a LOT to get done. The voice over to the TE application turned into a marathon nightmare, I couldn't get the microphone and sound settings to stick and ended up going to bed at 1am an 3am for 2 nights. However I was very happy with the end result and so was Marc, who has always been a very fair critic to me. This has taught me that each computer will sound different though and the quality of my laptop speakers is really not that great - am I thinking about investing in a laptop again after all that and working from a usb stick after all? I'm not yet inclined to do everything through Google Drive although I can certainly see how and why I would ......

Goals for this week:

1. Make a good start on the MLT Assignment - I really have to dig around in my brain (due on Friday, 21 October) for how I can set out the collaborative and interpretive part of the feedback process
2. Make a great start on the TPA Assignment, as that is due in 4 days earlier (due on Monday 1 October)
3. keep a few in the moment times as well, Myrddin posted a great reminder of that this morning as he was enjoying his morning coffee in the sun.

The seeds of learning have all been germinating and now it's up to me 

to nurture them into strong trees for knowledge 

Books, books and more books!

I've bought BOOKS!
I've never bought books for my teaching before, I go to the library and borrow theirs, or I read extracts from what I have been given as recommended readings, and up to now not really thought too much of it all. I tend to work instinctively and allow my referencing to fit around that, and move on to the next thing.
So what prompted this then?

I am a voracious reader and always have been. Part of my aim for this stage of my learning in the Graduate Diploma was not to create too much printing and paperwork - but the Research topic has caught me and I need to be ABLE to write all over stuff to get my thoughts around what I am learning. The word clouds are a fun way to visualise the mess in my head and from there I need to articulate my way into a cohesive body of writing. On Saturday I need to present where I am at for the Research Topic as well as for the Special Topic, and I want to present them both on different ways. They are both about my learning so far, not necessarily what my essay will be about. So I want to present what I have found in my bookish adventures and see where that will take me, for the following two subjects:

Research topic will be to describe how I would research the following question:
Why is reflective writing helpful in a practical course?

Special Topic is to summarise my learning journey so far on this topic:
How can students be encouraged to engage in deeper learning during a more compressed time frame?

What does that have to do with books?
I read Kathleen Gabriel's Teaching Unprepared Students in one sitting and realised that this book gave me so much insight into my own students and the issues we face, I can do a lot with that for the Special Topic, and that will lead to the Research in time as well.
Jonathan Bergman's Flip your Classroom I haven't read yet, but some Google Scholar articles helped me realise that more detail and examples will inform how I engage students more deeply. (Special Topic)
Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do is somewhat familiar to me since I read a portion of his writing during the Tertiary Teaching Certificate in January this year for our Team Teaching exercise:
Looking at this photo of where we started I can see the beginnings of my current topics quite clearly. Reflection, action and an ending are all pointing to the directions I want to take in my Special Topic as well as relating to the Research.



Learning, Change, Engagement and happy students are the products I wish to achieve through this deeper engagement and reflective writing. The challenge to me is in how I can unpack this and how can I measure the depths of the outcomes?



This is exciting and motivating, and what I have to recognise is the bit in the middle:



Patience will bring its own rewards - but I only have 14 hours to save the earth (oh no that's Flash Gordon)  a limited amount of time to instil that into my studies and my students....so IMMEDIATE engagement has to be the key - how to get that - RELATIONSHIPS, empathy and being accessible. Building up an equity of trust will develop the engagement so necessary for the deeper learning, and the best way to encourage that is to be myself.
This is what I have learned from not only my own adult educators, but from my bosses, my peers and from my readings, including Jane Vella, Ken Bain, David Boud, Kathleen Gabriel, Nathalie Depraz et al, Carr and Kemmis, and Mcniff and Whitehead, among others in my reading adventures over the past 6 weeks.
My own students have helped to crystallise a lot of half thoughts that have been lurking in the basement of my thoughts, and by asking the class on a regular basis how they feel about the use of technology and what they would like to see improve, I gain better insight into how to keep them better engaged and what does and does not work, particularly where it comes to how they find out the information needed and how we can confirm that more clearly in class.

Goals for Friday so I can get 9 copies for the class and Linda:

1. Separate this out into a presentation each for Research and for Special Topic - take a clear stance I think.
1. Research needs to be about the reading
2. define the terms of engagement - what is the question and for whom is it asked? Where and how will the paradigms and methodology be? What are the kinds of research that I need to take into consideration and how will I choose what wold be the most appropriate form of research? How did I get there?
2. Special Topic about the learning journey
1. define that - what have I learned - where did that come from? What do I feel about that now, in comparison with 6 weeks ago - what have I done with that time? What do I need to do next?
2. Why do I still feel I am skating around the target? I just found a list of questions to help with reflective writing - better use that then!

And now it is Saturday and class was really good. This combination of a few weeks away to think, read and work, then come in to class for 3 hours and share and discuss, is very helpful. The act of summarising where we are at and then sharing that for feedback is a very powerful method of informing us how we have progressed and whether our direction in thinking is not too far from the criteria we are aiming to meet. I had a 'phenomenology moment' after lunch today (Sharon from class called it that when she noticed how I had an AHA!! moment at our last class in March. Today's moment was realising how an answer to my questioning why even as facilitators of learning, when we are students, we make the same errors as our own students. My thought is this: as a teacher, we are one step removed from the learning, and are looking from the outside in, to what the student is doing, and that distance allows us to see where things need improving. When we study, we are emotionally involved, because now we a re the ones striving to achieve the goal of passing the assessment and ultimately the course. This closer proximity clouds our judgment and means we don't always see what we need to do, to be our ultimate best, so we make the same kinds of mistakes and leave bits out, just like our own students do.

For our next class we do one last Patchwork Text, now I know to just keep to my own journey and not put too much about my class or about reference my writing, but stick with how the events affect me and how they help me to learn.

what kind of researcher am I?

I came across this today. It has a downloadable log book which helped me to define my first thoughts into which paradigm and which methodology I would want to use. I found there seems to be quite an overlap as to how to see the differences and am starting to see this comes from the way in which schools of thought have evolved in the last 100 years.
Getting started as a researcher

So where am I going?

Research question

has adjusted from A. How can we define measure the effectiveness of reflective writing for a practical course by students?

to B. How is students’ reflective writing effective for a practical (food producing) course?

Methodology:

Questions and answers, find the evidence, reflect on that and draw conclusions.

I am liking the idea

a  Appreciative enquiry

Joe Hall & Sue Hammond; Lessons from the Field 

Paradigm:

I quite like the Post Structural paradigm:

collaborative – the researcher is as much involved as the researched, not just an observer and recorder – I can add in my own reasoning and experiences – this could bring about a faster result/conclusion if  I am working in it rather than on it. Uses historical  as the base on which to explore how the relationships of the researched validates the subject of the research.

from Grant & Giddings' Making Sense of Methodologies 2002.

That was quite a heavy read and I needed to get back to it a few times in bits to see if I got it, and to see how my thinking changed - careful reading helped me focus where my own paradigm would fit.

It makes me think of Piggott’s Problem Resolving Action Research model (with its emphasis on change), but now it is people, not concepts, so it might end up being too big a concept to use in this case. Better start off little and see how it develops – brings me back to the positive  paradigm (in which I could remain objective with anonymous subjects), or radical paradigm (which is about effecting a social change - and that is what would happen with successful reflective writing in a course teaching food production). I still prefer the collaborative idea in a Post Structural paradigm though as I can use my own experiences too.

Special Topic

How can we encourage deeper learning by students when their time for learning is getting more compressed?

a quick Google reveals a lot of literature on this subject with surprising findings. Google Scholar has some work, but not specific to this subject, and what I found interesting was not available to me unless I sign up to something else. Then I came across Interleaving as a method of teaching and learning in everyday Google:

Interleaving

I do this instinctively with my course work, but had not connected that to our new Baking programmes at L3 and L4 which actually also interleaf, come to thin of it. So a part of my original question may already have some answers

spacing-and-interleaving

 This is what we are now delivering across all levels. The proof will be in a year's  time when we have had 2 years of teaching and have feedback from industry as to the ability of our 'new' graduates.

It is good to know I am not making stuff up, but that this subject has the potential to be researched well, and supported by others in education.

GOALS: So over the next week I need to start constructing more questions to guide my study, set some timeline goals and continue to identify what literature will support my writing.