I started by talking about what I felt that I learned, both instruction- and research-wise, and how this was connected to where I come from.
In a 'technical sense,' I was 'raised' in an instructional environment that is mostly worksheet-driven and in which the direction that the instruction takes is largely predetermined (and dictated by the worksheets). In E2, I observed instruction that was more open-ended, and the direction that the class takes changed dynamically. Although I got the impression that Leslie and Stamatis always had a (sometimes detailed) plan, the plan changed as the teachers chose the questions that they wanted to pursue.
My previous instructional experiences, alongside my observations of E2 instruction, allowed me to better characterize some of the differences between 'guided' and '(more) open' inquiry:
On of the joys of the EPSRI for me was seeing how what is done at SPU is 'the same kind of different as me.' Although the quantitative research that I've done for the past five years is very different than the qualitative research that is done in the Energy Project, the two kinds of research intersect in more ways than I had anticipated. Both explore and synthesize multitudes of data (albeit different kinds), and although research questions are defined differently (and at different times), the research questions are semi-dynamic beings that evolve over time. (Perhaps that the research is so similar shouldn't surprise me, since we are all scientists, but it did!)
As I wrote in my EPSRI reflection, significant for me throughout this process is the continued refinement of a number of questions about assessment -- what it means, what it looks like, etc. Although not articulated very well, I included a slide attempting to hint at this:
The latter half of my presentation focused on what I thought about for most of the EPSRI, which was an interaction between Stamatis and a group of E2 teachers. I wrote several blog posts about this (five, in fact: one, two, three, four, and five). In short, Stamatis and this group of teachers had an interaction that just didn't work (by self report of both Stamatis and the teachers), and I wanted to figure out why. The clip that alerted me to this gem is here:
Context for the video can be found in this blog post.
I shared what struck me about the video:
And then my own impressions of the 70-minute interaction that took place. My first impression of the interaction was that the group just didn't get the question that had been asked of them. But then I noticed that they repeated (or appropriately reinterpreted) the question a number of times throughout the interaction, so maybe they did get the question, and something else went wrong. I started to look for other potential mismatches (and blogged about them here and here).
Ultimately, though, I began to wonder whether there was some other (perhaps deeper) 'mismatch' that took place during the 70-minute interaction, which generated a number of open questions:
...and ultimately led me to start paying attention to (a) things that the E2 participants said about the instructors or (b) things they said about their own classrooms (i.e., about themselves as instructors). I shared this clip of Don talking about his classroom:
(Context for this video can be found here.) This video itself led to a flurry of questions for me:
Finally, I ended with a series of possible directions for this 'project seed:'
As an afternote, Costas and I had coffee on Wednesday (immediately following the EPSRI Congress), and he suggested that anyone who might pursue this further should look into the 'learning styles' literature (in particular, search for papers by Sternberg).
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