I recently had the great opportunity to attend The Ontario Research in Education Symposium 2012 as a Faculty of Education student representative for Brock University.
Its been one week now since the symposium concluded and I’ve had plenty of time to allow what I learned (and I learned a lot!) to ruminate. Here is my reflection on this year’s topic: research impact.
Research Impact
When I heard the concept of “research impact” I must admit that I immediately thought about doing action research, reflecting on it and changing my practice for the better. This lead me to think about knowledge mobilization, and from there my first thought was: capital P, capital L, capital N. Its a no-brainer. What better way exists than sharing resources, best practices, success stories, new tools, tips, watchouts, how-tos (I could go on) with your network? (And, i’m taking it for granted that when I say network I mean “online network”).
Since my desire to one day do action research in my own classroom and my current penchant for reflective practice was my entry point into the world of educational research and evaluation, I had a huge learning curve during the course of this conference. I consider myself a pretty smart cookie, but I will admit to you that the opening address could have been a summit on Geothermal energy production (in Slovenian, no less). I had some serious adjusting to do to be able to absorb what I was hearing! OERS was not devoted to sharing the lesson plans and behaviour management strategies exchanged on Twitter via guest speaker experts and plenary sessions. No, indeed, its focus was making educational research more accessible among different education stakeholders (from school boards and administration to policy-makers to parents and media!). For 3 days, and during an engaging variety of plenary presentations, panel discussions, interactive workshops and displays, we examined barriers to accessing research, understanding it, and putting it to good use in the Ontario public education system. In terms of research impact - we were to think about it in terms of: a) awareness (being informed, knowing its out there, having access to it, disseminating it), b) action (putting theory into practice) and c) understanding - what does it all mean and how is it useful to me? In the back of my mind throughout the symposium was this question: How can I (and should I) as a future teacher use professional research?
Interactive Workshops
I took part in 3 break-out session workshops over the course of the 3 days wherein I learned that, as guest speaker and KNAER director, Ben Levin, so succinctly put it, a) we need a framework for integrating evaluation into organizational culture and b) we must build capacity to actually use evaluation and not neglect it.
Smartphones in Class
The first session I took part in was entitled, Research Of, For and By Practice - An Exploration of the Usage of Smartphones as Tools For Teaching and Learning In Schools. The session was led by John Vitale of Nipissing University. This was an interesting summary of research being conducted by the university using Blackberry Bold smartphones in the hands of pre-service teacher candidates during their placements. The facilitators had the audience break into groups and brainstorm our own ideas for smartphone use in the classroom. Our table came up with these: Poll Anywhere - Smartphones as Clickers, Webinar, Adobe Connect, Back channeling (Today’s Meet, Chatzy, Well Wish), listening to e-books, recording yourself doing a speech (metacognition, self-assessment), forum discussion to engage boys/ shy learners (not one in the same), capturing student learning (audio, video, still images) recording learning as it unfolds, unfolding text message stories in literacy. We also talked about BYOD (bring your own device), the controversy of wireless in schools (cost of bandwidth, health worries), extending learning beyond the walls and hours of the school, LMS, geo-caching, recording fieldtrips, and in addition to these exciting uses, every single ANTI-TECH barrage I’ve ever heard. If I’m ever in a debate on integrating tech into the classroom I can tell you I now know every possible counterpoint. I am interested to learn more on the topic and its implication on Ontario’s 21st century classroom.
Making Research Digestible
The next session “Knowledge Mobilization” was run by People For Education, an ingenious delivery of research findings entitled “Doing What Matters Most - How Parents Can Help Their Children Succeed in School”. PFE put together “tip sheets” for parents, teachers and principals on parent involvement in schools after an extensive review of research from the past 30 years on the topic. They boiled down the basics into easy to understand and highly useable tip sheets. So what? you ask. The clincher was this was the same research, but targeted to the audience in terms of language, facts highlighted, relevant info - the connection was extremely well-thought out and effective. This was exciting stuff and I can see all sorts of educational research, if mobilized this way, could really help expedite systems into increasing student engagement, equity and achievement. What I learned at this session was that for your research to “be known and actually make a difference” you need to start with a real-world problem, define, solve or propose a partial solution, decide your communication strategy, make it juicy, have a catchy hook and get the media involved. Then place yourself in existing media channels, add to existing knowledge, find the essence or a create a “top-line” of your findings/ boil it down and make it easily digestible for the people you want to impact. Be persistent. After all, the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
Developmental Evaluation
The final workshop, “Evaluation” was run by the Ministry of Education, Student Achievement Division and was entitled, “Infusing Evaluative Thinking Across the Education Sector.” It focused on Developmental Evaluation (DE) and its role in building capacity for recognizing and monitoring short-term gains in relation to the long-term goal of social change. I was fascinated in this topic as it relates to leadership. There was a deep discussion on a particularly useful Theory of Change Logic Model for documenting decisions and processes and then actually doing something useful with the learnings and knowledge gained from these initiatives on an ongoing basis. The cycle “Act, Observe, Reflect and Plan” has been drilled into us pre-service teacher candidates at Brock - good practice for being a successful teacher. It was exciting to learn that this same framework is used throughout the education sector (and not just in the microcosm of the classroom or the “front lines” as it were).
Social Media and Networking
In addition to the thought-provoking content of the presentations, participants were encouraged throughout the Symposium, to network and share interests, work, ideas and to, above all, make connections. A brokering board was set up to facilitate our networking, as was a text message counter, we were to text MEDU if we had a new idea and OERS if we made a connection. We periodically checked in to watch the tally of great connections and possible future collaborations grow. I was happy to see the integration of collaboration using technology at such a large education symposium. I left with a myriad of new ideas, connections, challenges, questions and brain synapses. I hope to return to this symposium one day with a presentation of my own on the integration of technology into the classroom to support student learning.
