Teachers and Researchers

I just got back from spending 3 days at CSSE 2012 - a national conference of educational researchers. I was invited as part of a panel of teachers and researchers to talk about my use of digital technologies in my Language Arts program. I was so focused on my part of the presentation that I don't think I gave much consideration to what I was going to get out of it apart from the experience of presenting my work to a larger audience. Turns out it was one of the best professional development experiences of my career so far and certainly gave me a lot to ponder.

As a classroom teacher, I haven't always had the most positive view of academic research. It often seemed so removed from the "real" classroom experience that it had little value to me and my practice. However, after spending a few days attending presentations and talking with a lot of researchers, I've come to the realization that I'm mostly just jealous. Most education researchers were classroom teachers. They know what it's like in there. But by moving to a more research-oriented stance they have the opportunity to do what I wish I had more time to do - reflect.

Teachers are all researchers. We spend all day gathering data from our students about what they can do and where we need to focus our instruction and attention. We use that data to plan our classes and help our students grow and learn, to figure out what works and what could use some tweaking. The complaint I hear most from teachers isn't about kids or parents or administrators, it's about time. We know that in order to analyze our data and become the most effective teachers we can be, we need more time to reflect, but by the time we get through a day in the classroom, attend meetings, make phone calls, assess student work, and plan what we do next, the time just isn't there to take a good hard look at everything we're doing and analyze its effectiveness or to search through the education research literature to see what the "experts" are saying. Not unless we wanted to live at school, like a lot of our students think we do!

That's why the research side of education is so important. Researchers are able to reflect more deeply on classroom practice than a lot of classroom practitioners have time for. But the most important lesson I've learned from my forays into the academic world of scientific research is that all teachers, to be really good at what they do, need to be researchers too. I think that the best way to improve education for our students is to build bridges between researchers and teachers, to open those lines of communication and have more dialogue and more partnerships between them. How do we make that happen?

Build Your Wild Self

Just came across the website http://buildyourwildself.com/. Considering that several of my students were talking about what animal they would be on Friday, it seems like the universe is handing me a way to build on their interests. I think I've just found the topic of their next assigned Kidblog post. I'm going to have them design their own wild self and then write a paragraph about why they chose each part. Now, if only Kidblog would let me post the assignment!