A Window Into the Design-Based Implementation Research Co-Design Process: Critical Features That Lead to Co-Learning

• In Event: 56.023 - Bridging the Research-Practice Divide: Designing and Implementing Project-Based Learning in Advanced Placement Physics

Abstract

Objective
This study examines the DBIR process over three years of an AP-PBL Physics project. A lead teacher designer and lead researcher use autoethnographic methods to share their perspectives on a co-design model in a research-practice partnership that blends theory and practice.

Perspectives
Brown (1992) argued that innovations addressing problems of practice should be developed collaboratively by educators and researchers. The majority of innovations, however, are top-down and consequently, the original intent may be lost in practice. In turn, researchers lose opportunities for their theories to be practice-tested and -informed. DBIR aims to counter this pattern by engaging all participants’ voices in development of the intervention from the start (Penuel, et al., 2011).

DBIR provides teachers and researchers with an on-going ‘learning while doing’ framework (Penuel, Roschelle & Shechtman, 2007), yet there are few formal descriptions in the literature of collaborative arrangements that foster the learning of both.

Data and Methods
We describe the collaborative process of the lead design Teacher and a lead Researcher through the full trajectory of a three year DBIR process, focusing on how a set of curriculum design principles were negotiated and deepened over time. Data consist of Teacher and Researcher reflections, analytic memos following each revision cycle, and iterations of the curriculum. Autoethnographic methods informed the analysis (de Vries, 2012).

Findings
Initially, principles are only superficially relevant to teachers’ design work
During the initial design phase, researchers oriented design teachers to the design principles. Researchers provided rationale and examples on our shared problem of practice (deep and adaptive learning in AP-PBL). Yet these principles remained tangentially and superficially relevant to the Teacher’s design work, especially in conceptualizing physics instruction.

Ongoing enactment anchored and fueled the collaborative development and refinement of design principles
Early on, the iterative course design process wasn’t as much collaborative as it was an exercise in layering - the Teacher designed physics activities, the Researcher embedded them in the context of the project and added design principles. Once the Teacher began enacting the course, however, we had an anchor by which to deepen the conversation. Together, we interrogated how curriculum/learning principles such as engagement first ought to manifest in physics in order to best fit the context and content.

The development of educative features necessitated deep examination of learning theory and pedagogy
This conversation was motivated, in part, by the inclusion of educative features in the curriculum (Davis & Krajcik, 2005). These features required the Teacher and Researcher to attend carefully to pedagogy and explicitly provide rationale for design choices. Rather than a layering on, we “shared the pen”. Through co-construction, we better understood our own and each other’s perspectives.

Conclusions & Significance
The term co-design is common parlance in educational research circles that represents a range of relationships in practice. This study presents a unique model where the voices/knowledge of both teacher and researcher hold equal value and are utilized to craft a curriculum that truly blends the best of learning/education theory and classroom practice.

Authors

• Ryan Lafferty, Bellevue School District

• Carol Margaret Adams, Seattle University