The Evolution of an Undergraduate Research Project

Many of you regular readers will know that I am constantly playing with my teaching practice--experimenting, exploring, trying to improve things. Maybe this says something about my inner state; maybe this means I'm never quite satisfied that it's "good enough." Honestly, that's probably true. I'm a work in progress, and I hope that I'm continuing to get better all the time.

I've taught Introduction to Education 15 times over the past 8 years, and it's one of my favorite courses to teach. It's also the course I teach that literally anyone in my department could teach...but I love it, and I like to think I'm a good fit for it. For the most part, I feel like I've got this course dialed in to where I want it to be: it's a pretty tightly aligned course, with clear learning targets, reasonable assessments, and instructional activities designed to ensure students will come away from the course with a strong foundation for the rest of their learning in our Teacher Preparation Program.

But...it's not perfect. (Obviously, since I am not perfect!) And so, I continue tinkering with the course, tweaking it, trying to find ways to make it a more engaging learning experience for students, one that will help them discern whether becoming a teacher is their calling, and helping them develop a beginning level of the knowledge and skills they will need as professional educators, should they decide to continue in the program.

As long as I've taught the course, I've had a research project as a key assignment. I assign students to research an education reform initiative, and share what they learn with their classmates. The goals for the project are threefold:

1. Students will have an opportunity to do educational research early in the Teacher Preparation Program, and learn the difference between "search" and "research." (I've designed the project to help them get the difference between these.)
2. Students will have an opportunity to become familiar with current issues in our field, and a variety of perspectives on those issues. (Education reform initiatives generally have multiple viewpoints behind them, and are typically nuanced issues where the answers are "better" or "worse" rather than "right" or "wrong.")
3. Students will have an opportunity to practice their teaching skills, by teaching their classmates about the topic they have researched. (They also have a field experience in a K-12 classroom where they have the opportunity to observe and interact with "real, live kids," but they don't typically get to practice much teaching in that experience. This gives them a chance to do so in a relatively safe environment.)

These broad goals have been part of every incarnation of the course that I've taught. While the details might change from semester to semester--and they definitely have!--the broad strokes have remained the same.

But that said, I've been dissatisfied with almost every version of the project we've done in the past. And because of this, I keep tweaking the project, trying to make it better.

Originally, it was a live, in-class presentation to the whole class. The downside: I needed to find enough different ed reform topics that a whole class of ~32 students would each have a topic of their own. Another downside: even if each of those presentations is only 5 minutes in length, that's about two weeks of class time devoted to hearing students' presentations. Not that this is time misspent, but I wondered if we were missing out on other things we could be doing and learning by devoting this much time to this project?

In the next version, I reimagined the project as a digital presentation. Instead of giving the presentation live, in class, students created a 5-minute screencast with voiceover to present their research to their classmates. This had some benefits of reducing the classroom time. The downside: how likely are students to watch 30 presentations via video outside of class? (Honestly: not very likely.) I made a small tweak to have them choose 10 classmates' videos to view, and fill out a short online form in response to each video to rate the presentation they viewed, and share a bit about what they learned. This worked, but when I surveyed students, they reported that they really didn't like this version of the project very much. It felt like tedious busywork.

On to the next draft! In the next version, I trimmed the list of potential topics down to just ten options. I selected topics that I knew there would be plenty of literature to research that would demonstrate multiple perspectives on the topic. (Topics included charter schools, merit pay for teachers, character education programs, and homework, among others.) Students would indicate three topics they would be most interested in researching, and then I arranged them into groups to collaborative research their topic and create a group presentation. These presentations were again digital, and the idea here would be that the rest of the class would have the opportunity to view the other groups' projects and rate them. The downside: students complained about the group nature of the project, and found it hard to find time and space to actually record the collaborative presentation. I was pretty sure this version of the project had legs, so I made a few small tweaks to try and make it function better. First, we moved to VoiceThread for the presentation tool, which made it more possible for students to collaborate on creating the presentation outside of class. I also started rearranging time in class so they had some face-to-face time to work on the planning, research, and organization of the project. I streamlined the rating form to make it feel less cumbersome to the students.

All of these tweaks helped, and the project was fine enough, overall. But I still felt like it was just "okay," and I wanted it to be a first-class learning experience for students.

And then, inspiration struck. 

At one professional conference I attend regularly, there is always a roundtable session in which people share their work in progress--their research so far--and solicit input from colleagues who come to listen and learn. What if I could take a cue from that experience, and reimagine the Education Reform Research Project?

And thus, the Education Reform Research Symposium was born.

Here's how the project worked this year in Intro to Ed:

I still had a limited number of topics students could choose among. The ten topics seem like good ones, with plenty of resources for students to research, and with high interest for students. I gave them a short introduction (about a minute for each topic idea) when I introduced the project, with the idea that they might not know what these topics were about otherwise. Students then indicated which topics they would be most interested in researching, and I ensured that they got one of their top three choices. (In fact, all but a handful got their first-choice topics.)

I decided to assign the topics to individual students, rather than groups, but I also made it clear that it would be fine to conduct their research along with the other students assigned the same topic. For the presentations, they were to prepare a five-minute, in-class presentation with visual aids for their audience.

But here is the twist: instead of performing a formal, whole-class presentation, each student shared their presentations at a table with several classmates who had all researched different topics. The idea being that each student would be the expert in their topic at their table, having conducted the research and developing an understanding of the issues involved. When they shared with their peers, they would be speaking out of their expertise, so classmates would learn from them. And they, in turn, would learn from each of their classmates who had developed a different expertise.

After each 5-minute presentation, each table would take five minutes to discuss the ideas and ask follow-up questions to the presenter. I encouraged the presenters that "I don't know" is a perfectly reasonable response if they didn't know, but I also coached them to say, "That is a topic for further research, because it was not central to my investigation." (Makes them sound like academics, right?!) Most students also took my cue to end their presentation with a question or two for their table-mates to guide the discussion time. Meanwhile, I was able to roam around the room, listen to part of every presentation, and eavesdrop on the table discussions after each presentation concluded. Sometimes I chimed in too, but mostly I wanted presenters to be able to talk from their expertise, and for their fellow students to ask questions and make sense of what they had learned. After each discussion concluded, I had students complete a streamlined rating form to share their take aways.

Welcome to the Introduction to Education Research Symposium!

Was it perfect? No. There are still some things I'll probably tweak for the next time around. But when I checked in with the presenters while their table-mates were completing the rating forms, almost without fail they said they really, really liked this style of presenting. It was less stressful than a formal presentation to the class, but they felt like they were able to share things they had learned in a meaningful way with an interested audience of peers. Several specifically said they were worried about the discussion aspect, but noted that it was actually really affirming that their classmates responded so positively, discussed actively, and asked good questions in response (which they were often able to answer for their peers, but if not, they felt good about saying, "I did not research that, so I'm not sure.")

One student said to me, "I wish my high school teachers had us do this kind of sharing in class." I thought that was interesting...and it has me wondering how well this would work as a methodology for middle school and high school classes? Certainly there is a place for formal presentations...but I'm thinking that the research symposium approach could be a great strategy to add to the teaching toolbox!