Frances Vitali,
Ph.D.
501 Midterm Summary
I have approached this inquiry
research seminar course with participants and instructor equally engaged as
colleagues in academic pursuit of extending our professional selves and
learning through communication, research, technology, and collaboration. The
emphasis is on how we communicate identified areas of interest through the work
we do with our students in and outside of our classroom settings; what research
(literary & people) informs our practice; how we are using technology to
our benefit; and how we collaborate with others in a supportive network through
writing groups, school support teams, and other nurturing venues?
I have expected you to be independent learners,
self-motivated to read to garner the content and connections. The questions
that emerge from recognizing and accepting yourself as practitioner researchers,
will confirm your role and identity as indeed, a teacher practitioner - expert
in your classroom with teaching talents, personal talents and interests,
collector, analyzer and writer of what you observe and do in your learning
setting. Above all, a questioner, extraordinaire, whose practice is based on
the premise of questions.
In developing your questions, the syllabus is
designed to gradually lead us through text and journal readings to understand
the practitioner research framework guiding each colleague to owning a
meaningful question to systematically research following a design, data
collection, results, analysis, interpretation and reflection as a formal
proposal. Journal Reflections help colleagues uncover the obvious direction of
their thinking toward recognizing their research question. Response Papers is a
research technique to help synthesize and reflect about pertinent information
concerning a topic. What you read now informs your question and most likely
will be applied to your research narrative next semester. As the culminating
year of your masters level work, the learning
roles are now returned to you, so
to speak, for each of you will share as research practitioners what matters to you
as an educator; what you know about your topic; how you will design a plan to
carefully explore this window of discovery with your students; and articulate your
proposal and eventually your research story to the research community. We are
not there yet but the stage has been set, I believe, for each colleague to
achieve the goal of writing the proposal and UNM IRB.
As the instructor of this course my
role is a coach who is beginning to know her team players, and who can
individually and effectively inspire them from the sidelines as they gain more
confidence in their question, the research process and themselves. A Question
Preview panel will be scheduled at the end of October as a stop along the way to share your research questions with a selected
research community - to try it on for
size to see where it needs to be tailored for the final fit-before
committing yourselves to your question proceeding with the research process.
My goal is that each of you recognize your competence
in each of the five dimensions of learning and to extend your own learning
experience and expectations beyond what
do you want me to do in this course to get a good grade to owning your own
learning with confidence and ownership to
this is what is important to me and I am exploring it in these ways. This
deep level of inquiry will extend to continuing the quality and insight within your
respective learning settings at school.
I
honor, recognize and celebrate the five dimensions of learning:
that each
colleague owns, shares and builds upon as their intellectual history. This is
what you will draw from and upon in their practitioner research process.
Midterm
evaluation
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Midterm and final summary/evaluation form is based
on the Learning Record Online (LRO) for college level developed by M.A. Syverson at the CWRL of the