my one pager start

Some thoughts buzzing around in my head about the one page I promised to write for Lesley in collaboration and my course.  I am a little worried that this will be a bit surface for you two learned ladies, but hopefully you might be able to help me pull it into shape.

For some time I had been increasingly unhappy with my course.  Many aspects bothered be

·       We had lost our way on the philosophy of the course and this meant there was not a good, if any, alignment between activities, assessment and learning objectives.

·       I have a large teaching team, but we did not or could not collaborate in any meaningful way.

·       Students see no meaning in the course and were thus very unhappy and critical of the course.

·       Likewise staff were not intune and pulling in the same direction.

·       We had added bits and pieces over time.  Each one put in to ‘patch’ a problem but it was now at a point of “where do we start to fix it”.

The last point became the fixation – this is a huge problem how and where do we start.  It was difficult to get past this.  Added onto this was do I have the resources – time, motivation, knowledge, skills TO fix it?

The ALTC grant provided some help in this and at least a starting point.  Undertaking the program logic was enlightening but at the same time incredibly depressing.  As someone who has prided myself on good teaching and good teaching principles it was literately devastating to find my course in such a state and of course a bit of a blow to my vanity.  Whilst I was still overwhelmed by the list of fixes required, I now at least had some motivation and some tools with which to work with.

In a simplistic sense this should have been all I required, but the reality of actually implementing the changes was another issue.  Of course time is always the biggest issue – time to do, time to think, time to review and reflect.  However as a teaching team we should have had between us the skills, knowledge and time to cover it.  But a team we were not.  Collaborating within a diverse group, whilst it could have used the strengths of many, did not deliver.  I believe the key issues were (and you can easily see the links back to key theories on teamwork)

·       We (the core teaching group) did not have a uniform idea of the goal – on the surface we all said we wanted to improve the course but we had slightly different ways ideas about the best way to achieve this.

·       We did not all have the same underpinning philosophy of how the course could/should run and achieve.  This varied from the ‘unbelievers’ to the ‘technocrats’ to the ‘misguided supporters’.  The course has a range of tutors allocated.  It covers longtimers, casual sessional staff and staff put in at the last minute due to (teaching) workload or student numbers.

·       Because of the diversity we have wide ranging motivations, teaching styles and overall commitment to the course.

·       Differing but overall inadequate theoretical knowledge of the learning and teaching theories.  For my part as ‘leader’ I lacked the knowledge to be able to mount counter arguments to proposed strategies or approached some members of the teaching team adopted.  Along these lines I had insufficient power to ensure consistency.

Can add more here

Conclusions

Problems revolve around

Clear goal

Making appropriate reference to the literature – finding, using, implementing etc

Proper ‘plan of attack’

Lack of knowledge and skills

I can see lots of links between what i am trying to say here and Lesley’s post on collaboration.  However before I expand further I’ll get some feedback as to if this is on the right track of what you were expecting or if it is too much navel gazing

Thinking about curriculum change

I've rather belatedly been doing some reading around curriculum change in engineering and come acorss this great article :
http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/4315732/walkington-2002-180k?da=y

She has lots of good if rather idealistic advice about the process which will provide some handy discussion points for our papers. I want to describe where all three cases have a measure of success and a measure of failure and compare the reasons for that to her advice. For instance she advocates extensive discussion and collaboration in devising and implementing change but time and again I keep thinking, yes, but... what about the staff memeber who stonewalls, what about the students who appear to conform but inwardly resist etc. Also, what do you do about insufficient institutional support?

Anyway, if you get a chance to glance at this before our next chat it would be great.

Lesley

Also have either of you come across a book called Engineering Education Research and Development in Curriculum and Instruction (Heywood 2005). I've just founf it and it seems like a good summary of the field.

Hi Kaya and Lyn

I've been working on Kaya's design model in the light of our project trying to come up with something that would help epople think about how to implement research results.
 http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/4299868/developing-the-design-model-52k?da=y

Needs a lot of work yet but I look forward to discussing it with you both tomorrow. And Kaya I know you asked for words but I'm working on 3 AAEE paers and developing my thinking about the direction for this Lund paper as I go so we'll have to do it in speech one more week. Sorry.

Lesley

And here are Lyn's notes on her own experience of setting up a new course:
http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/4302526/lyn-s-notes-16-july-82k?da=y

design-based research papers

Here are the two papers around design-based research:

REES paper:
Design-based research as a methodology for investigating learning in the classroom

AAEE paper:

Interdisciplinarity as a path to inclusivity in the engineering classroom: a design-based research approach

lesley's debrief notes

http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/4272360/debrief-notes001-pdf-july-10-2012-5-53-pm-671k?da=y

I was trying to upload my notes from previous Kaya discussions here but can't find how to do it. Kind of limits the usefulness of blogs for me and is particulalrly galling here since we are on about collaboration and we can't share files. At least you should have the notes by email.
Lesley

Hi Lesley and Kaya
Sorry, I am new to blogging, so this is just a trial post to see how it works.  I have read the post by lesley on collaboration.  I am keen to try this method because
1.  I want to see if it helps keep me on track and a bit more focused
2.  i am a deadlines person, so hopefully working with others will give me soem other external deadlines - deadlines I set for myself don;t work and I know I can break them without consequences :)
3.  I think to date i have skated along on the surface of a lot of knowledge.  If I am going to get anywhere ( and I don;'t mean promotion) than this has to improve.

So this is my first post.  Hope it works and is along the lines you want.
Lyn

I found this definition of collaboration on wikipedia which must be as generic as you can get.

Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal.^[1] It is a recursive^[2] process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, (this is more than the intersection of common goals seen in co-operative ventures, but a deep, collective, determination to reach an identical objective^{[by whom?][original research?]}) — for example, an intriguing^{[improper synthesis?]} endeavor^[3][4] that is creative in nature^[5]—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group.^[6] In particular, teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources.^[7] Collaboration is also present in opposing goals exhibiting the notion of adversarial collaboration, though this is not a common case for using the word.
Structured methods of collaboration encourage introspection of behavior and communication.^[6] These methods specifically aim to increase the success of teams as they engage in collaborative problem solving. Forms, rubrics, charts and graphs are useful in these situations to objectively document personal traits with the goal of improving performance in current and future projects.

The words that stand out for me are
Recursive
We normally want to have things done and dusted and not 'revisit' them but true collaboration involves revisiting. we ahve been doing this in our collaboration where we have kept coming back to a few themes and rethinking them. How much chance do students get to revisit, rethink, restate their issues. The assessment emphasis on a single performance militates aginst this.
Identical objective
I don't think collaborations ever start out with an identical objective (and how identical does identical need to be). A lot of the work of a collaboration is about "co-creating intent" - the process whereby we arrive at a better understanding of what our objectives can be by working with others who might see it differently. All too ofetn inteaching we set the objectives with no room for students to show us how we might improve on them. I'd liek to see us three reflect on this matter of setting objectives and what any objective might mean under different circumstances to different people.
Competition
this recognizes that collaboration is about more than 'playing nice'. there are real competitive advantages to be had from collaboration and this may be the only way to catch some people's attention. Many years ago I use an exercise said to come from NASA about solving a survial problem. It was possible to show that one person alone would die but in a team you had a betetr chance of survival. I have to say that most students still didn't believe in the benefits of teamwork even after having done the exercise, so string is the competitive spirit. this applies also to academics who are trained and rewarded for competition. How do we harbness that to collaboration?
Structured methods
Okay what might these be? How do we incorporate structure into our practice and teaching of collaboration without it being reduced to tick-a-box? Engineers always want tools but sometimes tools just hide the fact taht you don't really know how to do it. What are the tools that are really going to help? I want to say committed engagement, sustained conversation and regular reflection but I know that will get the cat's laugh in many quarters. So what message about collaboration do we need to take from our mutual experience?


Enough from me for now