Identifying and Applying Participant Learning Preferences in Professional Learning Supporting In Situ Educational Research

• In Event: Teachers as Researchers: Improving Practice Through Supported Inquiry

Abstract

When conducting in-situ educational research (i.e., research in a classroom jointly conducted by the classroom teacher and researcher), a tacit partnership is formed between the researcher and the classroom instructor. Both agree to first, investigate the use of a researcher proposed intervention in the teacher’s regular classroom and second, utilize some form of professional learning (PL) so that the classroom instructor is prepared via the PL in the purpose and use of the intervention with classroom students.
The purpose of this phenomenological case study was to describe what happened when a professor, his graduate assistant and the author, employed Moore’s transactional distance theory (TDT) as a negotiation framework to guide the process of co-designing professional learning.

Authors

• D. Mark Weiss, Utah State University

• Brian R. Belland, Utah State University