Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 16:32:28 -0800 (PST)
From: S. Mosborg <mosborg@u.washington.edu>
To: EDTEP 561: ;
Subject: SLP: Examples of patterns (themes)
Hi all,
To follow-up on our discussion in today's section (i.e. Thursday folks may want to read this later): To help you identify in your own SLP data the key patterns (themes) you want to write about, here are some examples of themes I found in the sample SLPs in Miller 322 (some of which are also on the course web site).
-"My classroom observations and individual interviews made it clear that [Ms S's] students look for significance in their reading in ways they have learned from her; they have constructed a sense of substantive structure in English which echoes Ms S's own." (Where Benjamin Franklin Meets Forest Gump, p. 8.5.)
-"[Both students] tried to apply their unconscious grammar rules to construct a Japanese sentence. They also tried to apply the CONSCIOUS grammar rules which were TAUGHT by Naomi to construct the sentence. Both times they failed because Japanese grammar rules were taught to the students who do not know or know only a little about the structure of the English sentence." (Action Verbs in Japanese, p. 9.6.)
-"SA truly had a firm grasp of the fundamental concept of the law of reflection, and could also implement the ray-tracing-method to situations that extended beyond the mirror and light scenarios. I believe that he had a solid conceptual foundation of this all-important law. SB, on the other hand could apply the ray-tracing-method only to identical situations (such as the concave mirror problems) yet could not extend his undersatnding of the law of reflection to other, similar cirucumstances." (High School Physics Student Learning Project, p. 16.1.)
-"Although the substantive elements in Mr. O's curriculum are appropriate to the structure of the discipline of biology, the syntactical elements are not." (Hearts and Minds in the Learning Process: A Case Study of Two Middle School Students Learning about the Ciruculatory System, p. 11.2.)
-"What the students both failed to remember, assuming they ever learned it, was the significance of this event--why it is considered an important part of history . . . The students are not being trained in any of the techniques that the historian uses to determine and evaluate significance." (Secondary History Student Learning Project, p. 6.5 & 13.5.")
Of course, these are merely examples to stimulate your own thinking. The authors of these SLPs had not done the pilot SLP and were not as far along as you are in the techniques of collecting and analyzing data about teacher-student learning interactions. Thus, I had to hunt and peck to find the themes in their analyses. Your paper, we hope, will be more clearly organized around a few main themes that lend support to an overarching thesis.
I think it's a good idea to try to let the themes bubble up. Read over your notes or listen to your tapes (in the car or on your walkman as you're walking around campus). Then, let your mind wander to your data every so often, say, as you're riding the bus, or walking around, or drifting off to sleep. The ideas that keep coming to mind are probably the interesting stuff in your data (the caveat being that you must be able to discuss the themes in terms of the ideas from this course).
Be generous with yourself. Don't expect that your insights have to be brilliant or your explanations air tight. That's the kind of insight into student learning you will be developing over the course of your career. For now it is important to work with the best ideas you have, and develop them into a thoughtful presentation. (That's the kind of thing you can do even as a beginning teacher, when you talk about student learning with parents, other teachers, and the students themselves.) Puzzles you want to explore further often make for the best themes, so long as you tease them out as far as you can with both evidence from your data and ideas from the course.
As always, free-writing or "rough-draft" talking your ideas out are often great ways to gain clarity. Your classmates and Sue and I are all sounding boards you can seek out. If you turn in a rough draft of work in progress to us by next Monday, we guarantee written feedback by Friday. If you turn it in later we'll do the best we can. (Papers are due 2 weeks from today.) Let us know if we can be of further assistance. Happy pattern finding!