Making
Learning Visible
How Documentation Creates a Space to Examine Teaching and Learning
This project set out to answer the following questions:
How can we create a new language to talk about learning?
How do we know what students are thinking as they
encounter challenges?
How do we create a classroom culture that is safe and encourages the co-construction
of new understanding?
What do faculty talk about after they view students in the
act of learning?
How does the examination of a learning episode modify instructional practice
at the course and program level?
How does the act of documentation impact the students
who are placed at risk in this research?
After completing the required Human Subjects procedures
and permissions, four second-quarter chemistry students were videotaped as
they worked on representing the polarity of sulfur dioxide three different
ways. Through this window on their learning, we see the social, emotional,
and intellectual complexity of one learning encounter. This video was converted
into images and text in a PowerPoint slide show.
This
show was presented to the entire chemistry class
with each participant reading aloud his or her own dialog. Reflections were
gathered from members of the class after viewing the program. The show was
later presented to other faculty and their discussions videotaped and analyzed.
Subsequently a group of faculty met to reflect on the chemistry program. Additionally,
the four student participants were interviewed on videotape at the end of
the term to assess
the impact of the slide show on their performance in the remaining 7 weeks
of the course.
The following results
were obtained:
Chemistry faculty
began to share a vocabulary that included:
Provocation: a stimulus to explicitly engage students with
cognitive dissonance
Co-construction: the collaborative ratcheting of each other's
understanding by conjectures and responses to other's ideas
Meta-cognition: the ability to articulate the social, emotional
and intellectual patterns in one's own learning
Representational Competence: opportunities to co-design concept
representations using molecular level drawings
Chemistry faculty
shared commitment to:
Creating more comfortable physical spaces for group work,
collaboratively designing projects, such as resonance, across general and
organic chemistry, widening the scope of course outcomes to make representational
competence, reasoning, and meta-cognition more explicit and visible to students,
attending to the stages of a learning episode and attaching language that
describes what learners do, providing freedom
to "free think", to represent and co-construct, and reflecting
on the necessity for making mistakes: how much guidance
is too much?
Participant students
agreed that the experience of seeing themselves learning supported their view
of themselves as competent, unique and interconnected with others.
When they worked together, they recognized deeper and more durable learning
and stronger dispositions to inquire and to sustain effort through mistakes
and misunderstandings.
Research Team:
Dr. Kalyn Owens, Tom Drummond
