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In-service program documentation
Monitoring and evaluating the implementation of an illustrative unit
(D6.7)
Logistics and scheduling information (by Judith Fonzi)
Developing "reflective practitioners" is a major goal of the in-service program. However, we have learned that it takes a great deal of time and patience to get participants to truly appreciate the value of more research-like practices. Participants quite quickly acknowledge the value of "engaging as learners" in the experiences they hope to provide for their students, then powerful role on-going sharing and reflecting plays in their learning, and the benefits of working collaboratively to develop and implement inquiry experiences in their classrooms. Even those who were initially the most reluctant, ultimately admit that writing journals helped them to make sense of what they were experiencing and learning. Though all these things require some investment of time, participants can easily see the practical contributions they make to "getting their job done". Clearly, by virtue of the fact that all of the participants in our program have been volunteers, they are certainly interested in "doing a better job" but ultimately they still must get the job done. Unfortunately, we routinely see participants trading off the time required to do the more in-depth data collection and analysis necessary to become deeply "reflective practitioners" to complete the paperwork / committee work / administrative assignments currently being piled on teachers. We believe that participants find it easier to trade off the in-depth data collection and analysis tasks because they have not yet experienced the value of doing such work. In a sense it seems to be a survival situation where participants make enough improvements in their teaching to make themselves feel better at least for the moment and also complete enough of the "other" work to satisfy those who are checking. Nevertheless, it has been our experience that if we continue to assign these activities some participants, at some point, do find the time to engage in some teacher-researcher experiences. And when they do, they always acknowledge having uncovered information that has significantly impacted their beliefs and/or practices. We therefore, continue to ask participants to document and reflect on their experiences implementing inquiry units and we continue to orchestrate activities to support such practices.
Participants are first made aware of the documentation and reflection requirements during the summer institute so that they develop clear expectations and can begin to collect the necessary data immediately. Facilitators try, as much as possible, to support the data collection by taking notes of meetings and classroom visits. Participants are further supported in their analysis and reflection by a written set of potential questions / prompts (included in the Instructional materials for this section). And finally, some time is scheduled during the Follow Up meetings to share the results of their reflections.
We ask participants to engage as "reflective practitioners" throughout the entire program, but especially upon the completion of each inquiry unit implementation. We have included, in the Participants' work for this section, some samples of participants' final reports and reflections on their experiences implementing illustrative units to show what might be expected at the very beginning of the program.