791 Sensemaking and Research Design Bog |
As a site academic specialist, my role includes providing professional development for my site. I present information to teachers during PLC's, staff meetings, and to our site leadership. I also present our school goals & data to parents during site council meetings and ELAC meetings. Our school and leadership determines our schools goals, all of our professional learning is based around these goals. With the help of other district academic specialist and administration, we come up with professional learning that will help our staff meet our school and district goals to better prepare our students for the future.
For this project and for my role as an academic specialist, my audience will be my staff of teachers. I am hoping that I will be able to use my capstone project in the professional learning for next year. As a school site, we have already been looking at academic language and how to improve and increase it. This capstone project will allow me to build on our school goals and create powerful professional learning for my school. My initial ideas are to continue to work with academic language and increasing student talk. I would like to expand the focus to include all subject areas, not just reading. How does increasing academic language effect student learning in all subject areas? I am thinking that I might plan some professional learning in Edivate. Edivate is a professional learning platform that the NVUSD uses to store sample lessons, training videos etc.. I am wondering if I could build units in Ediviate with multiple lessons about increasing academic language. These units could be presented during whole staff professional learning, during grade level PLC time or teachers could watch them on their own. It would provide choice for the teachers and lessons could be broken into small pieces or view independently to free up our precious staff time. The lessons built in Edivate could be customized for varying degrees of novices. The lessons could focus on different strategies and teachers could choose a strategy that would most fit their teaching style. I have no firm plan yet....just a lot of ideas. The readings for this week give me a good ideas about the structure and considerations that I need to think about before planning these lessons. What are the needs of my teachers? How do they learn the best? I think I need to start with narrowing down my driving question. After that, find out if Edivate will work for the purpose of this capstone project. Agggg...lots to do.
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I will admit that my first read went something like this...
"Sense-making is making sense in places where sense makes sense. And when sense-making doesn't make sense you need to make sense of the sense it doesn't make." Ummmm.... I needed a strategy, possibly more than one. First, I looked at the pictures and figures. I got an basic overview. Next, I read a few paragraphs at a time and walked away, did a chore, watched some TV, played some legos. I tackled the article like this, a few chunks at a time. Underlining important points and making notes in the margin. My next strategy was to turn on the computer and see what else was out there around Sense-making and/or Brenda Dervin. I actually found some videos of Brenda herself talking about sense-making. Then I went back to the article again. I had a better understanding from the previous reads and videos to piece together a basic working understanding of sense-making for myself. Sense-making is a "generalize methodological approach for the study of any situation in which one wishes to focus on how people construct sense of their experiences." For researchers or interviewers it is a method to look at how individuals get their information or needs met by focusing on their experiences. We can not assume that all people are alike, have the same needs, same questions or same experiences. We also can not assume that using demographic information creates more commonalities. All women or hispanics or catholics do not have the same wants, needs or experiences. "There is more diversity within these groups than between these groups and other groups if you think communicatively." Brenda Dervin Sense-making attempts to create a system or make sense of a system to be able to predict the needs of people to help bridge the gap in communication. Sense making methodology is understanding human behavior learning and ways to meet human needs. This is essential to drawing a meaningful conclusion from a research study. Dervin discusses different types of surveys that ask questions to better understand a user's experience. These surveys help systems, business, and/or researchers get information or products to people. How did their experience affect their resulting happiness or satisfaction? How did the communication used by the system help or hinder their experience? The different types of surveys discussed were the Satisfaction survery, the Image survey, the Help Chain and the Message/Q-ing survey. Each type is used by different systems in different situations to help determine how the user felt about their experience in order to bridge the gap between the user and the intended optimal outcome. Dervin provides several different examples of surveys being used in libraries, blood banks, colleges etc. As I read this article, I realize we have all been part of sense-making surveys. Every survey we fill out to rate our experience at the doctor or bank is a sense-making survey that is trying to better match the system with my personal needs. I have even sent out a few sense-making surveys as an academic specialist. Each time I send out a google survey to ask for feedback from my teachers, I am using sense-making. I am trying to match my professional development to the needs of each teacher. I wasn't able to define it, but we have already been using sense-making in our daily lives. |
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