Collaborative efforts in the scholarship of teaching.

Abstract

This article addresses the need to conduct research in college classrooms in a methodical way. The reciprocal nature of teaching and research is discussed. The body of the article describes a project at the University of Wyoming satellite campus in Casper conducted by three faculty members, showing how research, even that done in individual classrooms, can be done collaboratively. Working smartly, in this case, produced a number of conclusions about conducting research in classrooms that can be applicable to a number of different disciplines.

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According to Boyer (1990) scholarship in the world of academia includes four dimensions: discovery, integration, application and teaching. Scholarship of discovery encompasses the ideas of what we traditionally think of as research, pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Scholarship of integration, in its simplest form, is taking what has been learned and making it meaningful, connecting it in some way to what has been learned previously. Scholarship of application is taking the knowledge that has been made meaningful and applying it to existing problems.

The focus of this paper is on the scholarship of teaching, what it looks like in an individual classroom and how it can be conducted through a collaborative project. In describing the scholarship of teaching, Boyer (1990) states that all good teachers not only transmit knowledge, but they also transform and extend knowledge. Good teachers are also constantly learning.

In their description of the scholarship of teaching, Hutchings and Shulman (1999) state that Boyer did not "draw a sharp line between excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching" (p. 12). They explain that excellent teaching includes engaging students and fostering important forms of student learning. But, in order to be considered scholarship of teaching classroom practice should include "certain practices of classroom assessment and evidence gathering, ... peer collaboration and review" (p. 12).

Atkinson (2001) concurs with this, stating that scholarship of teaching is not scholarship until it is documented and available for peer review. Witt and Heinrich (2000) also say that scholarship of teaching includes the idea of sharing scholarly products with the broader community. While sharing scholarly products may include publication in journals, it can also include more informal types of sharing, such as the brown bag lunch (Hutchings, 2000). Boyer (1990) addresses the idea of faculty as a community of learners. "A campuswide, collaborative effort around teaching would be mutually enriching" (p. 80). The Carnegie Scholars emulate this ideal, meeting periodically to discuss the work they are doing. In describing these meetings Hutchings states that, "They [Carnegie Scholars] draw on and acknowledge one another's work" (p. 9).

In calling for more collaborative approaches to scholarship on campuses across our country, Boyer (1990) encourages campus presidents to get involved in this process, using their "power of persuasion" (p. 78) to enhance the work of creative campus projects. Sockett (2000) reiterates the need for a supportive infrastructure to allow the scholarship of teaching to be public.

I had the good fortune of participating in one such campus project at the University of Wyoming sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE). In the summer of 2000, Audrey Kleinsasser established InVISIBLE College at the CTE inviting professors and graduate students from all five colleges on the University of Wyoming campus. The purpose of INVISIBLE College was to provide opportunities for collaboration and reflective practices in the scholarship of teaching arena.

Like many large research universities, the emphasis on research at the University of Wyoming did not overtly emphasize research into the practice of teaching. Tierney and Rhoads (1994) talk about the ritual process of tenure and promotion and how the idea of research as an important step in this process becomes almost a part of a myth on many campuses, albeit a myth that carries much weight. Sherry (1994) states, "At my school prizes and chairs for teaching excellence and declarations of its importance in tenure and promotion have proliferated. Still, most schools, especially prestigious ones, continue to make scholarship the primary test for awarding tenure and promotion" (p. 1052). Because the researcher faces the pressure of accomplishing a certain amount of research within a limited period of time, the research takes on a life of its own. Boyer's (1990) idea in proposing the four domains of scholarship was to emphasize that each of the four domains holds an important place in scholarship and each could lead to relevant and worthwhile research.

Those of us who chose to participate in InVISIBLE College were encouraged to pursue a question of research by examining our own teaching. This could be done either individually or collaboratively, but the central idea involved was the collaborative nature of learning together from our pursuits. The members met four times throughout the academic year, sharing insights, successes and failures. In this way, the knowledge gained in a variety of courses was made public.

The project I chose to pursue had both an individual and a collaborative component. Working within my literacy methods course, I considered the problem of teaching preservice teachers how to teach writing in an elementary school classroom. The collaborative component of my project came about because I was part of a three-person team that met monthly to discuss our work. The members of my team were all located at the satellite campus of the University of Wyoming in Casper. I worked with Scott Seville, an assistant professor in biology and Maggi Murdock, a professor in criminal justice. While Seville conducted a project in one of his classes, Murdock acted as a consultant for both projects. The body of this paper describes the project I conducted, the work that I completed in the team and the conclusions drawn from this collaborative effort.

The Project

As stated above, I had decided to pursue the area of writing. Although I was a new assistant professor, I had taught the literacy methods course for elementary education students for several years. I was comfortable with the curriculum and knew that my teaching in most areas was high quality. But, I was less confident in teaching preservice teachers to teach writing to elementary students. I decided to add three trips to an elementary sixth grade class to give my students more hands-on experience in the area of teaching writing for intermediate grade students. I also planned to tie this together with an ongoing process of allowing students time to write during instructional time, following a model of writer's workshop (Calkins, 1994; Graves, 1994; Harwayne, 2000) found in elementary schools. Finally, I was adding a curriculum component on writing assessment, teaching students how to use a six-traits writing rubric for assessment purposes (http://www.nwrel.org/assessment/department.asp?d=1). I was explicit in telling my students that changes were being made as well as in informing them that this was a process to enhance their learning.

Throughout the semester, as I implemented the changes in my classroom, I kept a journal recording my observations and thoughts throughout the process. The journal was to help me stay reflective throughout the project and to share with my two partners, another way of making the research public. One of my journal entries looked like this:

   They [my students] also were clear that for many of them the in-class
   writing is difficult for them to do and they do not enjoy it. This gave me
   an opportunity to show them where we are going with this. It also tells me
   that I have not yet been clear enough with this activity and there are
   still a number of students who are struggling with the purpose and what
   they need to do be doing with this writing. It is also clear that there are
   some who just find any writing to be a painful process so they do not want
   to do it.

As I met with my colleagues, I was able to share what was happening in my class as well as listen to what was happening in Seville's project. Murdock acted as a sounding board for Seville and me and offered suggestions of what could be done as a next step. Three of our monthly meetings included phone consultations with Kathleen Blake Yancey, Pearce Professor of Professional Communication at Clemson University, who is an authority on writing and rhetoric. Yancey's insights into what was happening in the projects was important in two ways. First, her past experience in the area of writing and teaching writing was extremely helpful. Second, her expertise in the area of classroom research surpassed both Seville's and my own (Yancey, 1998). This allowed her to act as a mentor, offering support and suggestions for further research.

Because of these discussions as well as the reflective work in my own journal, I was able to make minor adjustments to the project as I was moving through it. In doing this, I was following a model outlined by Cross and Steadman (1996) as they described a case study of change being made in a history class at a large city college.

At the end of each semester, the students from my classes and Seville's participated in separate focus groups answering questions designed to give us in-depth information about their perceptions of the class experience. The information we received from the focus groups, as well as our journals and group discussions, helped us to re-examine the project before we moved into the spring semester.

From these focus groups I was able to see how one student perceived the introduction of a new topic to the class as a whole. I thought it was another lecture, it's six traits of writing. I will stick it in my notebook and I will be done with it. Then we kept working with it and working with it and I realized it was important and that I needed to know it and I was going to use it. Reading this statement made me wonder about my own practices when introducing new material. Had I fallen into the habit of assuming that because I knew of the importance of all of this material that the students would automatically encompass this knowledge as well? It did change the way I introduced topics of study and the amount of time I spent on making sure that students understood the purpose of incorporating the new information into their own repertoire of knowledge.

Based on the feedback from the focus groups and the discussions with my colleagues, I made a few minor changes in my project during the spring semester. I was much more explicit when introducing any new topic, but especially the topic of writing. The time that my class spent in the sixth grade classroom occurred over a shorter period of time and was scheduled and explicit in the syllabus from the beginning of the semester.

While both Seville and I felt that this project added invaluable information about our individual classes and our own approach to our pedagogical frameworks, our collaborative efforts were focused on what we were learning collectively about learning. This collaborative focus led to a number of conclusions.

What we learned

First, we agreed that we could only effectively change one part of the course at a time. I was focusing not only on the writing project with the sixth grade students, but I was also adding more writing time in the classroom and introducing new curriculum ideas about the assessment of writing. While these all seemed to fit together well, it might have been better to add one piece of this puzzle at a time. By adding one new piece at a time, we can focus on making that change effective as well as reflect upon and assess the value of the change.

We discovered anew the need to listen to our students as they evaluate our classes. We found that the students we are working with are reflective about their learning experiences. Not only did we conduct focus groups, we also spent time talking with our students throughout the semester. We found that the students appreciated being given the opportunity to share their ideas with us. We also found that the information gathered through focus groups was more useful to us as a group and as individuals than that gathered on the teaching evaluation forms currently in use.

Finally we found that students' perceptions of learning processes differ by academic discipline. The study we conducted included students in both education and science. We found that education students tend to be more reflective about their learning and the processes of learning. Science students are more interested in getting the content, and how things affect their grade. The question we were not able to answer from this data is--What does this mean? How do we work with all of this information to help all students be effective learners?

Conclusion

The importance of this study lies not in the individual aspects of the projects we conducted, but in the collaborative effort we participated in. By supporting INVISIBLE College, the University was explicit in giving value to the scholarship of teaching. Given my own background in education and qualitative research methods, it is not unlikely that I would have been capable of conducting this type of scholarly research in my own classroom.

But, there is often a huge gap between what one is capable of doing and what one actually does. Because of my position as a first year assistant professor, there were many demands upon my time and scholarship in the area of teaching could have been pushed aside in favor of working on committees, developing new courses and in general acclimating to a new set of responsibilities. Through the support I received from INVISIBLE College, my two colleagues at our satellite campus and our consulting relationship with Yancey, I was forced to take this aspect of scholarship seriously early in my career as university faculty.

The structure of InVISIBLE College and the process I completed with my colleagues is an example of what Boyer is advocating when he encourages university campuses to support collaborative scholarship. While I feel that I benefited a great deal from this process, I know that the work we completed was of a collaborative nature and the conclusions we drew from our work together had implications for each of us in our professional capacities.

References

Atkinson, M. P. (2001). The scholarship of teaching and learning: Reconceptualizing scholarship and transforming the academy. Social Forces, 79, 1217-1230.

Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. New York: the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Calkins, L. (1994). The art of teaching writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Cross, K. P. & Steadman, M. H. (1996). Classroom research: Implementing the scholarship of teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Graves, D. (1994). A fresh look at writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Harwayne, S. (1992). Lasting impressions: Weaving literature into the writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Hutchings, P. (2000). Opening lines: Approaches to the scholarship of teaching and learning. Menlo Park, CA: The Carnegie Foundation.

Hutchings, P. & Shulman, L.S. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: new elaborations, new developments. Change, 31, 10-15.

Sherry, M. S. (1994). We value teaching despite--And because of--Its low status. Journal of American History, 81, 1051-1054.

Sockett, H. (2000). Creating a culture for the scholarship of teaching. Inventio, 2, unnumbered pages.

Tierney, W. G. & Rhoads, R. A. (1994). Faculty socialization as cultural process: A mirror of institutional commitment. Washington, D. C.: The George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.

Witt, B. S. & Heinrich, K. T. (2000). Working smart: Turning everyday commitments into scholarly outcomes. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 31, (2), 71-75.

Yancey, K. B. (1998). Getting beyond exhaustion: reflection, self-assessment, and learning. The Clearing House, 72, (1), 13-17.

Smith-D'Arezzo, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming where she teaches elementary literacy methods classes.