Designing the Classroom Curriculum Designing the Classroom Curriculum | Page 130

Designing the Classroom Curriculum
the scope of deficiencies or otherwise and provides a set of standards for what should be aimed for and
achieved.
While a clinical research approach through qualitative and quantitative methods can be time consuming in a
classroom/school context on a day-to-day basis, the teacher’s established capacities to assess and collect
learning based performance data on their students is the starting point for the teacher as researcher. The
engagement with research methods and the subsequent analysis of such results, in a strategic manner
(meaning focused on key or core issues and at key junctures in the school year), is a ‘professional valuing
adding’ that enables objective and deep pedagogic performance issues to be identified and resolved at their
root cause.
Professional Learning and Application (PLA) to date is the most common approach to research used by the
teaching profession. It can be best understood as ‘the application of research findings” --- i.e. someone
‘external’ to the classroom does the clinical research and writes it up in journals, books or as teaching
resource materials --- for generic teacher reference. Works by Hattie (2009) and Marzano (1996) are examples
of such resource packages.
PLA typically follows a process of (1) the teacher collects specific classroom data --- i.e. assessment results
(2) and identifies an aspect of the (school or) classroom curriculum that is diminished --- i.e. learning failure
or other related circumstance identified. Using the Learning Diagnostics Process (For a complete outline of
the process refer to Lynch and Smith, 2012: “Designing the Classroom Curriculum in the Knowledge Age”) (3) the
teacher seeks out professional reading or in-service (i.e. ‘write-ups’) focused or referenced specifically to a
classroom based ‘problem’ or ‘question’ and (4) then uses findings from such ‘write-ups’ to assist the teacher
in processing their data and/or referencing remedial actions. (5) The classroom curriculum, through the
LMDP is then revisited.
Common to both the clinical research process and PLA is the notion of collecting and interrogating “data”.
Data can be broadly defined as a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn 56 and it can be
classified as being “raw” or “cooked”.
Raw indicating the data has not been processed by any statistical method whereas cooked indicates that it
“has been processed - that is, extracted, organized, and perhaps analysed and presented- for further use” 57 .
The process of interrogating data so as to find out things about a phenomena or occurrence leads to cooked
data. It’s at the cooked stage that the results of such a process can be used to make comparisons, determine
trends, benchmark or focus further inquiry work. In all cases however the initial ‘problem’ or ‘question’ is
the chief guide.
On another plane data can be classified as ‘useful’ or ‘not useful’ for teaching purposes and it is these two
concepts that we need to explore further if the teacher is to successfully utilize the processes of research in
their classrooms (or schools). Before we proceed with further explanation, let us first revise and focus our
goal in developing “teacher as researcher” capabilities.
Table 10.1: Data usefulness continuum
56
57
Defined by AudioEnglish.net located at http://www.audioenglish.net/dictionary/data.htm
Defined by SearchCRM located at http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/cooked-data
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