During this course, you have the chance to become a teacher-researcher. The course aims at bridging the gap between theory and practice in teachers' developmental work and professional learning.
In the course, you are to choose an educational challenge that is essential to your practice as a teacher, design a solution to it, test your solution and collect data on how your solution worked. The course is inspired by two research approaches, action research and design-based research, which can be used for improving your practice in a systematic and rigorous way.
Theme 1: Discover your design challenge
Teachers face educational problems of practice all the time - and they are used to coming up with solutions to the challenges they meet. In a teacher's daily working life there is, however, little time to explore problems of practice and test new solutions in a strategic and systematic way.
In this theme, you'll have the opportunity to dig deeper into a particular problem related to your own practice and to explore the context of the problem in question. Once you have completed this theme, you will have gained competencies in:
Identifying design challenges in your teaching profession
Collecting contextual facts that support or contribute to understanding a design challenge
Formulating design challenges that call for a solution.
Watch the video
Get acquainted with the resources on discovering educational problems of practice.
- This article describes how teaching and designing are related and what you can benefit from by viewing teaching from a design perspective.
- This magazine article helps frame the aim of the course: To scaffold you in becoming both more design-driven and research-based as a teacher.Utilize this template to identify five educational problems related to your own practice. Discover and describe at least five problems of practice that you have faced in your own practice as a teacher and would like to change.
Utilize this template to choose one of the problems that you identified in the previous task, formulate it as a design challenge, and provide 3-5 contextual facts that shed light on your chosen design challenge.
Theme 2: Explore solutions to your design challenge
Educational problems of practice are both complex and actionable, though they are unlikely to have a single right or wrong solution. For this reason, it's useful to brainstorm to gather as many ideas for solutions as possible, from the obvious to the wild and everything in between.
The overall purpose of this theme is for you to practice taking a strategic and systematic approach to problem solving and prototyping. Once you have completed this theme, you will have gained competencies in:
Ideating and brainstorming multiple solutions for a specific design challenge
Choosing among your ideas and sketching a prototype
Describing solutions to specific design challenges as learning designs, which can be shared with and reused by other teachers.
Watch the video.
Get acquainted with the resources on discovering educational problems of practice.
- In this web article you can read about seven reasons for sketching when designing just about everything. While the examples are taken from traditional design disciplines, the reasons can easily be applied to the field of education.
- In this article you can read and learn about what a learning design is before creating a learning design yourself. If you find the approach interesting, check out the suggestions for further reading at the end of the text.Find pens and/or pencils and pieces of blank paper. Spend 15 minutes maximum on sketching as many different solutions to your design challenge as possible. Come up with at least 10 different solutions... but it's perfectly fine if you can think of more.
Take a look at your 10 (or more) sketches of solutions to your design challenge. Choose the solution that you find most interesting and would like to test. Use your mobile phone to make a short video in which you show and explain what the sketch illustrates. Your video should be no longer than one minute.
Utilize this template to describe your preferred solution as a learning design.
Theme 3: Collect your data
You have now reached a point where you know which design challenge you would like to solve. When navigating through a research project, it is important to know different ways of collecting data, and to understand the basic guidelines that need to be considered when choosing the way, the amount and the quality of the data to be collected.
Research questions and problems can be answered and solved in many different ways and with several different data material. There are no simple solutions when it comes to deciding which data collection method is suitable for your project. It is a matter of different points of view: one kind of data sheds light on certain points of view, while other kinds of data shed light on other points of view.
In this theme, you will familiarise yourself with different ways of collecting data. You will gain competencies in
Identifying different ways of collecting data
Understanding data collection needs in regards to your own needs
Creating a data collection design.
Watch the video.
Get acquainted with the resources on collecting your data.
- Video presents differences between different types of interviews.
- Text on how to utilize interviews in data collection.
- Text on how to utilize interviews in data collection.
- Video introduces the method of focus group discussions.
- Video introduces the method of focus group discussions.
- Text on how to utilize focus group in data collection.
- Webpage on how and when to collect observational data.
- Webpage that discusses how to put together a useful questionnaire.
- Powerpoint presentation about using empathy based stories as data collection method.Familiarise yourself with this compaction of data collection methods.
Fill in the data collection design form that will help you to plan your data collection.
Collect your data.
Theme 4: Data analysis and sharing
You have now reached a point where it is time to analyse the data you have collected in order to find out how your solution worked.
In this theme, you will analyse the data you have collected and share your findings with others. In your data analysis, you are to follow the steps of the method(s) you chose in the theme Collect. In the end, you are to give a creative presentation of your project.
Once you have completed this theme, you will have gained competencies in:
Analysing, organising and coding data
Drawing conclusions and identifying findings based on empirical data
Presenting findings to others.
Watch the video.
Get acquainted with the resources on discovering educational problems of practice.
- Article that helps you in deciding which strategy to use in your analysis.
- Guide that supports and facilitates the process of analysing data from interviews.
- This interdisciplinary collection provides a general introduction to the analysis of qualitative data.
- This paper presents a simple framework for qualitative data analysis comprising three iterative questions. The authors developed it to analyse qualitative data and to engage with the process of continuous meaning-making and progressive focusing inherent to analysis processes.
Analyse your data using the guidelines for data analysis.
Create a presentation describing your findings. In your presentation, please present:
Your design challenge
The solution you tested
The reasons why you chose the given data collection method(s)
Your findings on how your solution worked
Any surprises you might have come across
How the findings affect your approach to the matter
The ways in which your findings might be of interest to others.
Consider the process of becoming a teacher-researcher. Write a short reflective text (approx. 200-250 words). Use the following questions as a starting point:
How would you describe your experience of the process of becoming a teacher-researcher?
What were the main obstacles you encountered?
Did anything surprise you in the process?
What did you enjoy the most in the process?
What would you do differently next time, if anything?
