“The question is not just ‘what does your machine produce,’ but ‘how does your garden...
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Transcript of “The question is not just ‘what does your machine produce,’ but ‘how does your garden...
“The question is not just ‘what does your machine produce,’ but ‘how does your garden grow’?”
Michael Scriven, “Thoughts on Educational Evaluation,” 1972
The Promise and Practice of Faculty Inquiry
Bill Moore, SBCTC &
Mickey Davis, UC-Berkeley
Research-
• Goals: make generalizable claims about causal relationships or processes
• Audience: national or international• Requirements: must conform to intensely
guarded norms of research community-- warrants for claims are highly technical,
including study design and methods of analysis
Evaluation
• Goals- determine the value and/or worth of a particular program or endeavor
• Audience- program participants, managers, and funders
• Requirements- Must be seen as credible and comprehensible to stakeholders. Inferences don’t need to be generalizable so warrants for inferences different
Faculty Inquiry
• Goals: to understand the teaching and learning process through a systematic and iterative examination and exploration of professional practice
• Audience: participating faculty • Requirements: the process of inquiry leads to
improvement through changes in awareness and focus and reforms instituted in response to findings
It takes a deliberate act to look at teaching from the perspective of learning. Actually, it takes a set of acts--individually
motivated and communally validated--to focus on questions and problems, gather data, interpret and share results…As with research, you cannot investigate everything at once.
What matters most is for teachers to investigate the problems that matter most to them…Ultimately, the measure of success for the scholarship of teaching movement will not
be the degree to which it can…discover solutions worth implementing, but the extent to which it is successful in
discovering problems worth pursuing. Randy Bass,
Georgetown University, 1999
Kinds of SOTL Questions
• “What works?” – questions seeking evidence about the relative effectiveness of different teaching approaches, e.g. alternative designs for delivering a course
• “What is?” – questions seeking to describe, not evaluate, a particular teaching approach or intervention, e.g. describe and systematically analyze student experience or learning outcomes
• “Visions of the possible” – questions related to teaching goals and how they can be achieved, e.g. how to reach students in “moments of difficulty” and transforming such instances into teachable moments
• “Conceptual frameworks” – questions shaping new forms of practice or theory-building, e.g. problem-based learning, community service-learning
Pat Hutchings, from Opening Lines…, 2000
SPECC: Faculty Inquiry Cases
The Core Work of the Project
Cross-College Inquiry Convenings
• Project leads (re connection to department, institution overall)
• Classroom exchanges/observations• Classroom/formative assessments• Faculty inquiry efforts• Data analyses re student progress,
achievement