Personal On-Demand Audio Reflections
in Teacher Professional Development
Brian H. Giza
The University of Texas at El Paso
Teacher Reflection in Professional Development
"Reflection is an active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed
form of knowledge in light of the grounds supporting it and future conclusions to
which it tends" (Dewey, 1933, p. 6).
Metacognition and reflection have long been a key component of effective instructional strategies (Dewey, 1933). Reflection in action “…is thinking that serves to reshape what we are doing while we are doing it” (Schön, 1987, p. 26). It is a well established assumption of professional development that when teachers reflect on their learning, and connect it to their practice, it is a powerful tool to transforming their behavior. (Loucks-Horsley, S., Hewson, P., Love, N., & Stiles, K., 1998, Schön 1983, 1987). Sharing those reflections among participants in professional development is potentially transformational, not just for the individual teacher, but for their colleagues as they build a shared, collective understanding of concepts and process how that concept may be taught (National Research Council, 1999). Most teacher reflections, however, are either shared orally in face-to-face sessions, or are provided via text-based environments - particularly in the context of distance education. The author of this study is a professor of science and technology education at a the University of Texas at El Paso located in the US-Mexico border region, collaborating in the study with a Physics faculty member at the same institution. The study reports on the results of a comparison of techniques of reflection among teachers in a brief (two weeks) intensive course in physics for teachers. In addition to daily three-to-four hour sessions, the teachers interacted and reflected in an online course environment each evening. In the context of this paper, "teachers" will be assumed to mean the participants in the university course, "faculty" will be assumed to mean their professors, and "pupils" will be assumed to mean their K-12 pupils.
Course Characteristics
Loucks-Horsley, Hewson, Love, & Stiles (1998, p.36) listed the following principles that shape effective professional development experiences. Such experiences:
- Are driven by a well-defined image of effective classroom learning and teaching;
- Provide opportunities for teachers to build their knowledge and skills;
- Use or model with teachers the strategies teachers will use with their pupils;
- Build a learning community;.
- Support teachers to serve in leadership roles;
- Provide links to other parts of the education system; and
- Are continuously assessing themselves and making improvement to ensure positive impact on teacher effectiveness, student learning, leadership, and the school community.
In this study, the physics course was designed in accordance with these principles. It was team-taught by a member of the University College of Science Physics Faculty, and a member of the University College of Education Technology & Science Education Faculty. It took a hands-on approach in which faculty demonstrations of key physics concepts (e.g.: Newton's Laws of Motion, buoyancy) were integrated with teacher discussions, peer-group planning, and peer-group presentations. Interaction among the participants and faculty, as well as among the teacher participants was a sine qua non of the course design in accordance with the collaborative learning communities as described in the National Research Council's 1999 publication "How People Learn" (p.192), and its related 2005 publication, "Scientific inquiry and how people learn (Bransford, & Donovan, 2005).
Why Podcasts?
The PODcast name is derived from the term "Personal On-Demand" – although its etymology is also closely associated with the popular Apple iPOD media device that is frequently associated with these tools. Podcasts are audio and sometimes other forms of rich media that are stored on a server, and in their most interactive form, are integrated with a web application and database so that they may be accessed automatically by software that checks for the latest version of a file and downloads it automatically, which is a task most commonly accomplished via a set of protocols known as an RSS feed (Godwin-Jones, 2005). "PODcasts” or “podcasts” (note the difference in capitalization) have become a recent, but fast-growing method for providing content. A quick visit to many of the online services or a search on the term “podcast” will turn up many thousands of MP3 or related file format files, ready for download via automated tools (such as RSS feeds) or simply via web-connected links. In the opinion of the author, there are three global ways that this form of content may be used in the classroom: (1) by providing content – whether music, or speech, or, in the case of “enhanced podcasts” with visual materials in a rich media that can be referred to over and over again. Most radio stations and news programs now provide content in podcast format for users to download and listen to at their convenience, whether offline, or online (Donnely & Berge, 2006). In form (2) podcasts may be used to convey information back and forth in dialogues – much as text posts in an asynchronous discussion group. This approach is used more rarely, but the author uses it, for example, in a science education course for teachers seeking bilingual teacher certification, in which dialect and inflection become an important part of the conversation. In form (3) the podcast becomes a tool for encouraging or enhancing teacher reflection in professional development, and it is this form that is the focus of this article.
A key choice that was made early on was to use a tool and file format that was both free and platform neutral. Teachers already have a large number of demands on their pocketbook, and teachers paying for university courses have even more. Furthermore, in a world where choice of computer operating system is a form of identity that approaches religious persuasion in its intensity, the safest, most agnostic approach was to find a tool that worked equally well on all the major computer platforms. The tool that best fit the requirements was Audacity, an open-source (free) and cross-platform sound-editing and recording software that is highly regarded among both professionals and amateurs alike. It will install and function equally well on all the modern versions of the common platforms – whether Apple, Windows, or Linux. It can record audio files, and save them to the commonly distributed MP3 digital audio file format, among others. The MP3 format was chosen because it is the most common method by which sound files are exchanged over the Internet, and all the major forms of media-players support it. It took only a few minutes to demonstrate how to attach a headphone-and-microphone combination to a computer, and show the participants how to record, save, and upload an MP3 format file. Recent versions of the Audacity recording software may even be run from a USB-flash drive, without the "administrator rights" requirement for software installation that foils many well-meaning teachers' use of technology in classrooms supported by remote and less-than-helpful information technology personnel. Free, high-quality tools also have the added benefit of providing access to technology for low-income students. All they need is access to an inexpensive computer and they too may begin producing multimedia via free, open source software.
The Population
The 19 participants in the study were all degree-holding preservice or inservice teachers taking a graduate physics course as part of a professional development program focused on improving the science teaching skills of elementary and middle school teachers. Five of the participants were male, and the remaining twelve were female. Fifteen of the nineteen were minorities - fourteen were Hispanic, and one was African American. This is not very different from the general proportion in the El Paso region, which is 84% Hispanic (UTEP CIERP, 2005). Based upon 2000 Census data, this border region is one of the lowest socio-economic urban areas in the United States. Only nine percent of the residents of the community have a college degree. Teachers in the courses covered by the study were either certified teachers pursuing additional coursework for professional growth, or were degree-holding participants in an alternative certification program seeking their initial certification. One person was seeking their initial certification, without a current teaching placement, and one teacher was certified, but not currently working in a classroom. Two were secondary teachers certified in Special Education, two were secondary science teachers certified in all-levels science, and the rest were working as teachers in grades 5 - 8.
The Study
The goal of the research was to focus on the issue of spontaneity in construction of reflections. There are easily at least two points of view that might apply, which might be summarized in terms of the following question: Are spontaneous oral reflections more or less likely to be useful (in developing metacognition) than more carefully constructed written ones are? Taken in context with other research in the educational uses of this new technology, the results of this small study (n of 19) may provide direction when developing strategies for the use of podcasts as a tool for facilitating reflection among the participants in professional development programs. The study can serve as a guide, a pilot for additional studies that explore related aspects in greater depth. To keep the focus of the study as tight as possible, and to establish a foundation for the future work the research question was limited to:
Do teachers in science professional development reflect differently in written versus orally-recorded reflections?
Procedure:
The teachers developed lessons that used audio-recording tools in their current classrooms in accordance with professional development models suggested by Loucks-Horsley et al. (1998), and by the International society for Technology in Education (2002), that is, they wrote, shared, and critiqued each others’ technology and science education lessons.
The reflection questions for each day were:
1. What did you learn today?
2. How might you use what you learned today in a classroom in the future?
3. How do you think what you studied today might prepare you for what you might learn tomorrow?
Results
Reflection word count was one of the few quantitative measures available for measurement in the activity. – but this procedure did show very clearly that the oral reflections were significantly longer than the written ones were. In each and every set of daily reflections the average number of words in the oral reflections exceeded the average number of words in the written reflections. On a per-day basis the oral reflections ranged between 5% longer to 122% longer. The longer oral reflections held constant even on the last day of class, when the number of questions was two, instead of three (the question "How will this prepare you for the next class" was dropped, since there were no more classes in the course). In sum, of the nine days of oral-written reflections, in six of the nine days the longest individual reflection for that day was the oral one. More significantly, on every one of the nine days of reflections the average length of the oral reflections exceeded the average length of the written ones, even though the questions asked were identical. In five of the nine days of reflections the oral reflections were over 50 percent longer than the written ones. It should be noted that the length was not due to “filler” words, longer or more complex clauses, or other grammatical constructions. The number of ideas mentioned was greater in the oral reflections ("branching"), with the written ones tending to be terser and tightly constructed ("more linear"). What was fascinating was hearing the thinking take place in the pauses in the recordings as a participant would stop for a moment, and move on to a new idea – something that almost never took place in the written reflections, which tended to be much more straightforward. The two differences between oral and written reflections identified in the study were clearly evident: oral reflections were both more extensive and more branched.
In interviews with the course participants at the end of the course, the oral reflections were frequently referred to as having been an enhancement. While the participants were encouraged to return-to and listen to their own audio and written reflections, one surprising turn of events was the fact that many of the participants began playing their reflections to each other, laughing or commenting upon each others observations. The podcasts became a tool for building community and for engendering group processing in addition to the personal processing that was taking place.
Future Research
The strategy of using oral-recorded expression may have significance in a number of different components of teacher professional development in the future. There are a number of additional studies that can be done just in the case of teacher reflection. For example, are the oral, audio-recorded reflections more or less cognitively complex than the written ones? Are there identifiable patterns to the way concepts expressed during reflections (oral or written) branch? Are the differences more due to spontaneity, and time of construction than to the way they were constructed (oral vs. written)? Are they more or less positive (or negative), or are they essentially affect neutral? These interesting questions can provide interesting opportunities for both researchers and designers of professional development who may wish to explore new ways to integrate emerging technologies with their teacher enhancement programs.
Software Sources
Audacity. Free, open-source audio recording and editing software available for the Microsoft Windows, Apple OSX, and Linux operating systems at http://audacity.sourceforge.net.
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