Introduction:

In this assignment you demonstrate that you understand the central ideas of this course and can apply them to an analysis of the teaching-learning process. In completing your paper, you should explicitly employ (and make reference to) the ideas we have discussed in class and encountered in the readings. At some point during this assignment, you may feel like cursing us or cursing this class, but ultimately we think you will thank us. This assignment gives you a rare opportunity to understand in great detail what actually goes on in students' minds. Unfortunately, when you are responsible for 120-150 students, an investigation at this level of detail may be too time-consuming to arrange. You will find, however, that you will use many of the same techniques to assess your own students' learning.

The directions for this project are very detailed.  Although some may feel this is unnecessarily constraining, there is a reason for the detail: Few if any of the students in Dilemmas will have experience in writing up educational research.  To be true to our discipline, we must teach you something about how new knowledge is constructed and evaluated in education and psychology.  We accomplish this, in part, through the "scaffolded instruction" in this assignment.

You need to do the following things to complete this assignment:

(1) arrange to observe three consecutive sessions of instruction in your subject area;

(2) take notes during your observations and collect any "artifacts" (worksheets, tests, handouts, etc.) the teacher distributes to students;

(3) interview two students about what they learned; and finally

(4) analyze the whole experience in the form of a 13-15 page paper .

Step 1: Arranging to observe instruction: By the time you go out in the field, your site coordinators and cooperating teachers will know about the SLP. You should each take an extra copy of the handout we sent for teachers, just in case. You should observe for at least three class periods of instruction (feel free to observe more, but three days is the minimum). Make sure that you explain to the teacher that this is not an assignment in teacher evaluation -- your goal is to understand student learning, not to pass judgment on teaching. Even with this assurance, some teachers may have reservations about letting you into their classrooms. Be tactful, and politely explain the goals of this assignment. Reassure teachers that

(a) their names will not be used in the papers,

(b) students' names will also not be used,

(c) the name of the school will not be used, and

(d) the purpose of this assignment is to help you become a better teacher by giving you an opportunity to look at student learning in great detail.

If your cooperating teacher feels uncomfortable about you doing this assignment in his/her class, then knock on other doors until you find a willing and helpful person. Your site coordinator will help you if you ask. If you have exhausted all of the above possibilities, call or email your instructor or TA. A WORD TO THE WISE: Don't wait until the last minute to arrange this. You should start to make inquiries about conducting your observations as soon as possible after you begin your field experience. The sooner you begin conducting interviews, the more leeway you have in case the unexpected happens (and we've had snow, bomb threats, assemblies, substitute teachers, and divers other forms of the unexpected get in the way of SLPs).

Step 2: Recruiting students: Once you have found a willing teacher, ask him/her about students you might interview. You want to interview at least two different students (the more different, the more interesting your interview is likely to be, but both should be comfortable and willing to talk). Prior to your observations, make arrangements with students to interview them as soon after instruction as possible. (You will be interviewing them separately). This will take some arranging. Several options exist. If your teachers are cooperative people, you might ask them to find a quiet spot for you to interview students after class or at the end of a lesson (if time), and also arrange with the students' next teacher for them to come to class a bit late. If this is not feasible, find out if the students have any free periods -- you will be interviewing students separately so you might have to juggle your time and theirs. Lunch time is also a good interview time as well as after school or during any tutorial or study periods they may have. Depending on the number of questions you ask and your students' glibness, interviews should last between 15-20 minutes per student. Students MUST participate voluntarily and be free to stop the interview at any time.  Make sure your teacher and the students know this.  Explain to the students that, if they consent to be interviewed, they will be helping you learn how students learn in this subject.

Recommended minimum timetable for collecting data:

Day 1 Observe class. Talk to teacher about the planned lesson for Day 2 (and 3 if possible) -- what does he/she want students to learn? Get copies of any assigned readings or homework for next day. Plan your strategy for interview; develop thinkaloud task and questions.

Day 2 Observe class. Interview two students. Collect artifacts. Write out field notes, insights, questions, explanations of tasks, etc. while they are fresh in your mind. Check with teacher about plans for Day 3 lesson, get copies of readings, etc. Plan Day 3 interview tasks and questions, reflecting on what worked or didn't in your first interviews.

Day 3 Observe class. Interview same two students. Collect artifacts. Write out field notes, insights, questions, explanations of tasks, etc. Thank the teacher and the students profusely.

Step 3: Planning for the observation

Before you begin, it is essential that you know what will be expected of you. Read these directions and the scoring rubric carefully and make sure you understand them. Asking questions before you go out to the field may save you grief later. Also, we recommend that you read two or three of the sample STPs before you plan your own: find them at http://faculty.washington.edu/sunolen/samples.html. Get a sense of the kinds of data you need to support arguments for interpretation, and the kinds of questions that might elicit those data, and keep that in mind as you plan your own interviews.

Once your are in the field, talk with the teacher ahead of time to find out what is planned for your observation days. Use the first of your three days to get a feel for what the class is working on (and how) and begin thinking of good thinkaloud activities and interview questions (see below). Read any relevant materials (student assigned readings, segments of textbook from which students will be learning, etc.) Your goal in observing instruction is to provide a context for this project. For this assignment, you want to focus on the main ideas of the lessons; the major points and transitions in the teacher's presentation; the nature of the teacher's representations; and the content of discussions, activities, recitations, etc. Though classroom management is important to good teaching (and you will have opportunities to focus on it later on in the program), it should not be your focus in this assignment. You should be most attuned to how ideas are handled in the classroom. (NOTE: "Instruction" might be the design and implementation of a small group task, a Socratic seminar, or a lab experiment -- there may be little whole-group instruction with the teacher standing in front of the class and talking.)

In watching instruction, think about these questions:

• What is it that the teacher wants students to learn?
• Do students (particularly your interviewees) seem to be grasping what is taught?
• How does what students say or do provide evidence for this?
• How do students talk about the material/ideas/problems with each other and/or the teacher?
• What kinds of representations does the teacher use, if any?
• What messages does the form of teaching convey to students about the structure of the subject matter?
• How does this lesson relate to students' prior knowledge, what has come before and what will follow? How does the teacher help students see these connections?
• Given what you think the teacher has taught, what do you predict students have learned?

You are strongly encouraged to devise a thinkaloud or extension task for your interviewees. This task should ask students to apply and extend what they are supposed to have been learning in the lesson. For example, if they have learned a technique for analyzing poetry, give them a new short poem and ask them to think aloud as they analyze it. If they have learned a principle in history, or a version of an event, you might ask them to find parallels in a similar but different event. If they have learned an algorithm in mathematics, ask them to think aloud as they solve a new problem (word problems are particularly good), and ask them to explain why they are doing each step. We will work with you on developing thinkaloud tasks and probing for student understandings and conceptions.

Try to get students to represent their understanding in a variety of ways (e.g., lists, diagrams, narrative accounts, pictures and so on). Don't be satisfied that students have truly understood what was taught simply because they can repeat, in essentially the same language, what their teacher told them. The true nature of student understandings are only revealed with continued probing by the interviewer, by drawing diagrams and explaining, by struggling with problems slightly beyond current understandings. Find gentle and non-threatening ways to probe your students, to get beneath their surface understanding. When you do this, however, do so in a playful way; try to avoid any kind of test-like atmosphere in your interviews.

Make sure you are familiar with the kinds of questions you need to address in your analysis (see Section 5 below).  Try to create tasks and questions that will provide you with the data you need to do this.

To capture students' words, you may tape record the interview with the student's permission. They must be told that tape recording is voluntary and that they may review the tape and erase anything they don't want recorded. Although students will rarely want to do either of these things, they must be given the opportunity. During your interviews with students you should jot down notes and collect any artifacts produced by the students (drawings, diagrams, written work). If you are unable to use a tape recorder, don't worry about getting verbatim quotations; aim at capturing the gist of what they say. After each interview, spend some time by yourself jotting down your first impressions and hunches -- these "first impressions" are often the source of important insights, yet fade quickly if not captured on paper.

Very Important: Remember that the goal of this assignment is to understand how students construct meaning from instruction -- how they try to make sense of what the teacher and other students say and do. With this goal in mind, select the questions and follow-up questions that are most fitting given your particular situation. The questions you ask of students should be tied to the specific content of the instruction you observed. Questions like "How do you like this class?  and "What's your favorite subject?" may be ok as icebreakers, but they will not get you very far in your quest to find out what they took from the instruction.

Step 5: Analyzing data

Analyzing qualitative (interview, observation) data involves looking for themes related to the research questions. In the case of the SLP, you are looking for themes related to the central questions of: what did students learn? and how did they learn it? In addition, you will be looking for specific aspects of the teaching-learning process that relate to the readings and discussions from Dilemmas. You'll use these ideas to help you figure out, from your data, what students learned, and how they learned it.

Susan Mosborg, a fantastic interviewer/analyzer who was a TA for this course in earlier years sent our students (then) some examples of themes from past successful SLPs, several of which are online. You can read her email by clicking here.

In analyzing your data, here are some aspects to consider:

• What was the relationship between the teacher's representation of content and how students learned content?
• How sophisticated were the representations of the content/ideas in the students' minds?
• How did the students simplify and reconstruct what the teacher/activity/text communicated?
• What concepts did the student acquire (or begin to acquire)?
• What did the students learn about the relationships among these concepts?
• What did students learn about the nature (or the structure) of the subject matter/discipline? How did they learn this?
• What kinds of connections did the students make between what they heard/saw and their prior understandings, and why?
• What misconceptions or beliefs got in the way of student learning?
• What might account for differences/similarities in the responses of the two students you interviewed?
• What were the attitudes of the students toward what they learned (not necessarily toward the subject matter in general)?
• What was surprising to you about what students took away from the lessons?

Step 6: Writing it up The final stage of this project is a paper analyzing your observations and interviews. As you write, you will find that you change your mind, re-evaluate evidence, or even change the theme you started out with. This is normal in this kind of research. Writing will help you clarify your thoughts.

Your analysis should have resulted in a central theme that you will use to focus your paper.  Consider:  What is this a case of?  What big idea forms the guts of your interpretation of data?  Create a title that captures this theme.

Papers should consist of five interwoven parts:

(1) a brief description of the lessons you observed (don't forget to include the grade level of the students you interviewed), focusing on issues relevant to the communication of knowledge; this section should be no longer than five pages, preferably less;

(2) an analysis of what was in the heads of the students you interviewed, using the theories and concepts you have learned in this course and supporting your assertions with snippets of data;

(3) your analysis of the teaching-learning process you observed, again using* theories and concepts from this course (citing specific readings by author's name), paying particular attention to how students constructed meaning from instruction (this is the most important part of all) and supporting your assertions with snippets of data;

(4) implications of your data for your own future teaching, and,

(5) reflections about the whole process (not more than a page), focusing on

    (a) questions you might ask students if you could do the assignment again and

    (b) any other aspects of this assignment that are important to you.

(6) Attach an appendix of materials you collected. (No need to include your transcripts of interviews though.) On the first page of the appendix list all questions you asked students. Make sure each appendix entry is labeled at the top of each page.

Before you begin writing, carefully review these directions and the scoring rubric for the project. The scoring rubric tells you exactly what we are looking for in an SLP; you shouldn't have to guess what criteria we will use. We will closely follow the rubric in assigning grades.

Make sure that you put page numbers on each page of your SLP. Staple (rather than tape or clip -- these things tend to get lost!) the entire bundle and hand it in. We anticipate that most papers will be between 13 and 15 pages long (double-spaced), not including the appendices.

If you have questions, please consult with your instructor or TA. A selection of previous students' successful SLPs can be found at http://faculty.washington.edu/sunolen/samples.html. However, remember that the assignment has changed over time, and that different instructors have used somewhat different standards in grading. When in doubt, go with the instructions in this document and the scoring rubric attached.

We encourage you to come to us with drafts, outlines, or rough ideas before the SLP is due.
 
 
GOOD LUCK!