Useful Sharing

1. Sally Fincher 24th February 2009 Useful Sharing

2. Why “useful”? • Because most isn’t. • “Transfer of best practice” • What’s “best”? For who? How? With what evidence? • Rhetoric of dissemination • Publish at conferences • Case studies, pedagogy papers, database of good practice, “thinking group” reports • Calls on a research model of social networks – of how knowledge passes across institutional boundaries • “Until recently, professional development for teachers has been embedded in a sacred story of research disconnected from practice.” (Olson)

3. Research (for a moment) • Research is an activity that stands outside of any one institution. • Researchers gain internal value/kudos by activity that is validated by an external community of peers and indicators (papers published, grants awarded, prizes won) over which the institution has no control. • It happens “elsewhere”. • A corollary of this sort of external network is that research information is exchanged between institutions as a matter of course.

4. Teaching is not research • Teaching is specific and situated. • It’s located in institutions, and in subject matter. • I teach in the same classroom you teach in, we are seen to be doing “the same thing”. • No external visibility: no external esteem. • So, I’m having problems teaching public static void main– where can I get help? • Sadly, not institutionally. I’m the only one teaching Java and staff developers don’t have the domain knowledge to help.

5. History of practice • From published material? Well … what, exactly? • Architecture • preserves its creations in both plans and edifices • Law • builds a case literature of opinions and interpretations (and Religion, too – think Talmudic scholarship) • Chess, bridge, ballet • all have traditions of preserving both memorable games and choreographed performances through inventive forms of notation and recording • “Teaching is conducted without an audience of peers. It is devoid of a history of practice.”(Shulman)

6. Representation of Our Practice? • I’m not sure what it is, but I have some thoughts on what it’s not: • It’s not a journal paper (reports something quite different) • It’s not made up (not a case study) • I doubt it’s abstracted (no “buyer’s context”) • “In a society that attaches particular value to ‘abstract knowledge,’ the details of practice have come to be seen as nonessential, unimportant, and easily developed once the relevant abstractions have been grasped. Thus education, training, and technology design generally focus on abstract representations to the detriment, if not exclusion of actual practice.” (Brown & Duguid)

7. Representation of Our Practice? • I’m not sure what it is, but I have some thoughts on what it’s not, • It’s not a journal paper (reports something quite different) • It’s not made up (not a case study) • I doubt it’s abstracted (no “buyer’s context”) • An appropriate form is important if we are searching for solutions to our problems, looking for ideas to adopt, and also if we are crafting material to share. From either side of the exchange, similar questions emerge. • What detail is important? • What features are salient?

8. Problems of knowing • If we’re going to usefully share practice, how do we identify what teachers think is important, is salient? • One way would be to look at the way teachers classify the kinds of knowledge they draw on: the way they think about things. • There have been several attempts to describe this.

9. Attempts to describe a practitioners’ epistemology of practice: Lee Shulman • content knowledge. • general pedagogical knowledge, with special reference to those broad principles and strategies of classroom management and organisation that appear to transcend subject matter. • curriculum knowledge, with particular grasp of the materials and programmes that serve as ‘tools of the trade’ for teachers. • pedagogical content knowledge, that special amalgam of content and pedagogy that is uniquely the province of teachers, their own special form of professional understanding. • knowledge of learners and their characteristics. • knowledge of educational contexts, ranging from the workings of the group or classroom, the governance and financing of school districts, to the character of communities and cultures. • knowledge of educational ends, purposes and values, and their philosophical and historical grounds.

10. Attempts to describe a practitioners’ epistemology of practice: Max Van Manen Noncognitive knowing: • Knowledge resides in action as lived • in our confident doing, style, and practical tact • in habituated acting and routine practices • Knowledge resides in the body • in an immediate corporeal sense of things • in our gestures, demeanor • Knowledge resides in the world • in being with the things of our world • in situations of at-homeness, dwelling • Knowledge resides in relations • in the encounter with others • in relations of trust, recognition, intimacy

11. Attempts to describe a practitioners’ epistemology of practice: Anderson & Page • Technical knowledge • (“academic knowledge is technical knowledge”) • Local knowledge • (“includes the narratives that are idiosyncratic to a local school or community setting … included within this domain is knowledge of local politics, and local cultures and sub-cultures”) • Craft knowledge • (“consists of the repertoire of examples, images, understandings and actions that practitioners build up over time”) • Personal knowledge

12. Personal, but not idiosyncratic • We can all recognise something in all these classifications. • We can “read” our experience against them. • “narratives are key components in the authentic study of teaching, for until we understand the context and appreciate the perspectives of those involved, any understanding of what it means to teach and learn will remain fragmented and disconnected from the real world of teaching” (Olson)

13. Disciplinary Commons • I'm interested in models of what the Americans call "Commons“: situations where individuals take collective responsibility for common resources. • Definitely a model of “useful sharing”. • For teaching, might it be away of producing (and curating) appropriate, long-lasting representations of practice?

14. Disciplinary Commons: Aims • To document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in the UK. • To establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators: creating a teaching-appropriate document of practice equivalent to the research-appropriate journal paper.

15. Disciplinary Commons: Structure • A Commons is constituted from 10-20 practitioners sharing the same disciplinary background, teaching the same subject – sometimes the same module – in different institutions. • Meet monthly throughout an academic year. • During meetings practice is shared, peer-reviewed and ultimately documented in course portfolios

16. Disciplinary Commons: Participation • Part of the sharing is cross-institutional peer observation of teaching. • We learn an unusual amount about the practices in other institutions (otherwise only obtainable by “charismatic embedding”). • This, it turns out, has high internal value.

17. Disciplinary Commons: Portfolio form • Have six sections: • Context • Content • Instructional Design • Delivery • Assessment • Evaluation • Each section consists of an artefact and a commentary. • Detail and discussion. • Evidence and narrative. • What and why. • Personal, but not idiosyncratic

18. Disciplinary Commons: Reification • Documentation of teaching practice is: • Rare • In non-standard (& therefore non-comparable) forms • Commons portfolios have: • Common form • Persistent, peer-reviewed deliverable • Power of portfolios is multiplied when there are several examples available for a disciplinary area • Commons archives provide a rich set of contextualised data, charting and calibrating development over time

19. What is special about Commons portfolios? • All Commoners are expert • Commoners work together to discover, interpret and re-interpret new material • Resultant public documentation is contextual, comparative and collegial • As appropriate a representation of teaching as a journal paper is of research? • Maybe. Watch this space.

20. References • Margaret Olson, Narrative Epistemology in Practice. Curriculum Inquiry 27:4, 1997 • John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, And Innovation. Organizational Science 2:1, Feb 1991 • Lee S Shulman Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform. Harvard Educational Review 57:1 March 1987 • Gary Anderson & Bonnie Page Narrative Knowledge and Educational Administration: The Stories that Guide Our Practice in The Knowledge Base in Educational Administration: Multiple Perspectives Edited by Robert Donmoyer, Michael Imber, James Joseph Scheurich SUNY Press, 1995

21. References • Max Van Manen The Practice of Practice in: Manfred Lange, John Olson, Henning Hansen & Wolfgang BŸnder (eds.) Changing Schools/Changing Practices: Perspectives on Educational Reform and Teacher Professionalism, 1999 • Disciplinary Commons: seehttp://www.disciplinarycommons.orgThere are links to individual Disciplinary Commons from that page (for example, introductory teaching of programming)

22. Acknowledgements Josh Tenenberg and I jointly devised the Disciplinary Commons model The US Disciplinary Commons was made possible by funding from the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, the University of Washington, Tacoma. The UK Disciplinary Commons were made possible through the award of a National Teaching Fellowship 2005 to Sally Fincher, via a workpackage of CETL ALiC and a TQEF small grant from Leeds Metropolitan University

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