Discussions

Your Name and Title: Dita Fischl PhD

School or Organization Name: Kaye College, Israel

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: MIddle East

Language in Which You Will Present: English or Hebrew

Target Audience(s):Teacher in higher education

Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

Title: Do lecturer's knowledge, attitude, beliefs, change/develop?  Can these changes be identified in their feedbacks to student's papers?

This paper is an attempt to begin a conversation with college and university teachers. I teach and guide students in a college for teacher education in Israel. I have noticed that my remarks and my attitude to student's assignments  have changed over the years and  I looked for research on the issue. I was surprised to find very little research on teachers in higher education although there is an abundance of research on students written assignments and teachers professional learning (such as Opfer & Pedder, 2011(. There  seems to be an agreement among the research community that written  assignments help students learn, enriches and organizes their understandings, but almost no reference to its contribution to teachers in higher education  that plan, write and read these  assignments,  write comments and in long term assignments such as thesis and  projects, read and comment on the same assignment many times. 

The research I found , such as Scardamalia & Bereiter (2006 (, refers to sharing knowledge in community learning, by "letting in" students, so they can be part of a heterogeneous group, of experts and novices.  Volpe-Horii (2007( proposes to allow students present their knowledge even when it is wrong, assuming that the shared knowledge will help students gain new understandings. Still, there seems to be no research on changes that  teachers in higher education experience as a longitudinal and developmental process.

I 'm inclined to believe that part of this lack stems from practical reasons, since till not so many years ago assignments were submitted on paper, read, feedback was written on the paper assignment and returned to the student. Now, technology enables to save assignments which makes follow up studies on teachers' activity, such as feedback remarks, organizing habits, the way a teacher formulates and expresses an opinion… and much more. 

 This is a proposal for an action research or a self -study, which is a beginning, since I believe that the future research on this issue will be even more sharing, creating communities of teachers that will want to share their professional process and reflect on their professional development based on accumulated documents.

References

Opfer, V.D. & Pedder, D.(2011(. Conceptualizing teacher professional learning. Review of Educational Research , 81(3), 376-407.

Scardamalia, M., & Bereiter, C. (2006). Knowledge building: Theory, pedagogy, and

technology. In K. Sawyer (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 97-118).New York: Cambridge University Press.

Volpe-Horii, C.(2007(. Teaching insights from adult learning theory. JVME , 34 (4), 369-376.