Notes for our Tuesday evening session, 11/10/05, 4.30-7.00 in 1WN 3.8 on our educational enquiries and research methods in education.
I'm looking forward to seeing you and to hearing your thoughts from experiences that matter to you over last week. Each of your enquiries is unique because of who you are, the children you teach and the contexts you are in. Do please come each week with something to share from what you have been doing, that is helpful in communicating to others (your response partner – the person you talked to at the end of the last session about what you would bring to this session) what you value about what you are doing and what you are working on to help pupils to improve their learning.
Meg & Nina – Looking forward to sharing your ideas.
Claire & Gill – I really liked the way St. John's mission statement has been co-created and it would be good it you could bring copies for the group.
If you all have access to a mission statement you identify with it would be good to share it to see if we can understand better the values that motivate us to do what we do.
Towards the end of the last session I said that I was interested in any ideas from other people that you had integrated in your own understandings of what you are doing in your classrooms (or other sites of your professional practice like Marie's and Robyn's). So, after we have had a few minutes to check-in with each other about experiences of the week, let's share some of these ideas. I'm thinking of ideas that have helped to form your present view as to what makes learning, educational.
At the end of our last session Nerys said that she would
find an overview of the programme helpful. Just see if the following notes are
useful. Don't hesitate to e-mail me with suggestions as to what you would
find most helpful in the sessions.
The TTA funding covers your registration and fees for 12 months for the two masters units on educational enquiry and research methods in education. The assignment for a unit is a maximum of a 4,500 word assignment where the 4,500 words doesn't include your bibliography or your appendices. The appendices can contain multi-media artefacts such as video-clips, audio-tapes, DVD and CD-Rom. The educational enquiry is a question of your choice that is focused on your educational influences in your own learning as you work to help your pupils improve their learning. We will need to set a deadline sometime in early March for the submission of the educational enquiry and then sometime in early September for the research methods in education assignment.
If you
would like to get an idea of the kind of educational enquiries colleagues in
local schools have been doing you can access these at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/mastermod.shtml
These
include single unit enquiries:
Patricia
Kelly's enquiry, 'How do I understand my values of humanity in the classroom?'
Victoria
Kennedy's 'Why is inclusionality so important to me?'
Graham
Lloyd's 'How do I/we help the students in Key Stage 4 improve their learning if
they are in danger of underperforming?'
They
include the educational enquiry MA dissertations of Mark Potts, Beatriz Grandi
and Daisy Walsh.
One of my
favourite educational enquiries is Kathryn Yeaman's Creating Educative Dialogue
in an Infant Classroom at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/module/kathy.htm
but this
was an assignment for an action research module before we put a 4,500 word
limit on assignments.
It may be
too early to emphasise the importance of the methods we use in research in
education but for those who would like to get an overview of the kind of
account you might produce by next September the following might be helpful:
Karen Collins'
(2002) Methods of Educational Enquiry Module: Plan of a small-scale enquiry
linked to the development of a skills-based cross-curricular Citizenship based
module for Able, Gifted and Talented students in Years 9-11, bearing in mind
particularly the concepts of validity, reliability and triangulation and how
they are related in this context.
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/module/kcmee.pdf
Mark Potts' Methods of Educational Enquiry
Module, submitted July 2003, on - What methods of enquiry can I use to live out
my democratic values more fully?
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/module/mpmee.htm
Simon
Riding's Methods of Educational Enquiry Module, Sept. 2002: A Case Study on the
impact of a teacher-research group at Westwood St Thomas School on professional
knowledge and development.
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/module/srmee.pdf
Ed –
let's persevere with showing your clip(s). It might just be a matter of
downloading the appropriate software onto the computer at work – or onto
Marie's notebook
Vic &
Richard – do bring the curriculum document you've been working on –
I thought the way you described its creation corresponded with the way Darren
created his own curriculum with Richard and the other pupils in the production
of the hot air balloon. It would be good to hear your ideas about the
principles of organization you've used in this curriculum.
If you would like an overview of the Research Methods in Education Unit you can access this
at http://www.bath.ac.uk/education/ma/units/rme.htm. If you would like to download the unit outline in
pdf format you can do this from http://www.bath.ac.uk/education/ma/units/rme.pdf