Learning from a Learning Study

Adamson, B., & Walker, E. (2011). Messy collaboration: Learning from a Learning Study. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(1), 29-36. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2010.06.024

Background

Learning Study (LS) is a systematic investigation into lessons, underpinned by the theory of variation, which views teaching as a continuous process of changing students’ ways of perceiving the object of learning.

Aims

The study examined the collaboration between the participants in the LS which focused on the topic of personal pronouns to understand the affordances for teaching and learning.

Sample

The study involved a team of four teachers of English as a foreign language in a Hong Kong secondary school, their Grade 8 classes, and two researcher-participants from a tertiary institution, one of whom was Cathy.

Method

Three Research Lessons were taught, with changes based on the experience of delivering the previous lesson being integrated into the second and third iterations. Pre- and post-tests were administered to six students, two high-achieving, two middle-achieving, and two low-achieving. Video-recorded student interviews, audio-recorded teacher meetings, and Cathy’s post-study audio-recorded reflections were collected.

Findings

From the pilot pre-test, the four teachers believed that students were confused with the forms and grammatical functions of personal pronouns. Conflict arose when Cathy argued from a systemic functional perspective that students had showed only minimal understanding of the referential nature of pronouns. Contrary to the teachers’ initial diagnosis, subsequently all students correctly answered almost all the questions in the revised pre-test which required them to group given words as pronouns rather than to classify contextualized words independently. Cathy also argued for using text-types which would offer language rich enough for students to observe adequate variation in pronouns used. However, the teachers chose the text ‘Mary had a little lamb’ to present the three elements, ‘doer’, ‘action’, and ‘receiver’. The teachers believed that the text needed to be linguistically undemanding and familiar to enable students to find examples of the three elements in the text. Post-test results supported the findings from interviews in which students had indicated that they found it difficult to distinguish between the uses of object and possessive pronouns. It appeared that students’ initial assumptions about clause position as the sole determiner of personal pronoun choice remained unchanged.

Implications

The study pointed to the potential tensions in partnerships between a school and a tertiary institution arising from outsider-versus-insider perspectives and academic versus grounded knowledge bases. Enabling discussion characterised by open debate and the means to critically review competing theories is called for to engender significant knowledge production in collaborative work.

Original article retrieved from ScienceDirect.