Practice-informed Research

BIG QUESTION: Am I researcher? Is every current teacher a researcher?

For the first time in a few years, I signed up for a graduate-level education course through a local university. The class was called “Using Practice-Informed Research to Maximize Student Learning.” Typically, I only take math-related graduate-level courses, because I find the education classes to be full of fluff and buzz words, without any real value added at the conclusion of the class. This class, however, was different because you tailored it to your content area and interests.

The class consisted of two live Zoom calls (3 hours each) followed by multiple Blackboard assignments with required comments on peers’ work to build conversation.

The first thing we did was discuss what practice-informed research was. I had some experience with this from my Master’s final project and paper on conducting a study to determine whether a flipped classroom improved student achievement in my classroom. That was five years ago though, and since then, I have not thought too much about my role as a potential researcher in the classroom. It was nice to remind myself again that, as a current teacher, I am in a great position to try some new methods out and perform my own research. I think I summarized it best on Blackboard in one of my responses (pasted below):

“Practice-informed research is an empowering and exciting concept for teachers. Rather than simply waiting for the next educational trend to be published by researchers, teachers use their intution and daily experiences to create their own research to identify research-backed best practices. Oftentimes in education, the pendulum swings back and forth in terms of what is considered to be ‘best practice’ at any given point. Teachers, now more than ever, can be at the forefront of this cycle and help guide researchers by conducting their own studies. Teachers are in the best position to conduct this, since they are ‘in the trenches’ and have access to data from their day-t0day work. Additionally, teachers can immediately assess whether a specific intervention is effective or not. ”

The main goals of the class were to identify one issue in education related to your academic content area and one issue in education related to SEL/behavior issues. You then explored all of the resources available through the university’s online library and found research related to your issues that already exists. You were to write one literature review for your academic issue and one for your SEL/behavior issue. Based on all of this information and analysis, you were to come up with an academic question of inquiry and an SEL/behavior question of inquiry.

My academic question was: “In the secondary mathematics classroom, does a Standards-Based Grading (SBG) system improve student achievement and increase a sense of ownership over learning?”

[if you’ve read any of the my past posts, you’ll already know that I am very interested in BTC and SBG!]

My SEL question was: “Does a standards-based grading system in the secondary math classroom decrease math anxiety among students?”

[WORD document version HERE].

Initially, my SEL question was: “Does intentional non-curricular community-building improve students' sense of belonging, discourse, risk taking, and ultimately, achievement in the secondary mathematics classroom?"

I still like the above SEL question, and I found it especially relevant after the return from Covid, when it seemed every teenager had anxiety and avoided face-to-facer conversations. If someone had a question, they would raise their hand and wait for me to come over, even if someone directly next to them was working on the same question and making progress. Even worse, if I had just spent the past two minutes explaining something to a student, a student literally three feet away would raise their hand and ask me the exact same thing!!!! They had no idea they had the same question the whole time, and the second student refused to engage in a conversation between me and the first student, and instead expected me to repeat the entire two minute explanation again. This happened all the time during the 2021-22 school year. Thankfully, this past 2022-23 school year was much better, but I did spend a lot of time building in ‘forced’ conversations in pairs and small groups throughout the whole year and also collected phones in a shoe rack every day as students walked in, so they kind of had to talk to each other.

Speaking of phones, the majority of teachers in the class chose to focus their SEL/behavior question on cell phones in the classroom. Clearly, as we all know, cell phones and social media have destroyed humanity and society, but let’s be real, teenagers aren’t the one ones struggling with this.

The best part of this class was having access to a huge range of peer-reviewed online-access journals, articles, publications, and more!

I miss having all of that high-quality information at my fingertips like I did in college (ahhh, EBRSO, ERIC, and more!). I discovered some other neat resources that I had never heard of before, like the CASEL SEL competencies and the CRIOP: Culturally Responsive Instruction Observable Practices. I learned that within a couple years, SEL and CR competencies will be part of public school teachers’ evaluation rubrics. Best to get acquainted with these resources now then.

The last part of the class was to take the academic and SEL questions of inquiry and design interventions or modifications in your classroom to answer the questions. You had to consider DATA - HOW can you measure whether your intervention actually worked? You also had to somehow consider a control group - either last year’s group of students (if they are similar to this upcoming year’s group) or by implementing the intervention in one class but not the other and comparing end-of-year-results.

I am really going to try to actually use some or all of my proposed interventions this upcoming school year. I see a huge need for interventions to decrease the amount of math anxiety I see students struggling with, and one of my big goals at the end of this past school year was switching to Standards-based Grading, at least in my Algebra II class.

I just finished my final assignment for the class a few days ago, and now that my AP Calculus bootcamp is also done, I feel like it’s finally really summer time for me!