1. S570: Session 9 Workshopping Proposals Jal Mehta November 1, 2012

2. Plan Workshop proposals (10:15 - 12:15) (including break) Mini Lecture – Common themes (12:15 – 12:30) Open discussion (12:30 – 1:00)

3. To Remember In Giving Feedback Working as a team to help the presenter develop the best version of their work Listen – try to think about their goals and whether the proposed project would achieve them Resonance – Tell them what particularly resonates, what you heard that you wanted to learn more about Constructive criticism – If there big holes/gaps in what is being proposed, gently name them Barn raise – Help them create a better project; don’t just tear down existing ideas

4. To Remember In Receiving Feedback Frame where you are and what kind of feedback would be helpful The more honest you are in where you are struggling the more help people can be The more you talk, the less feedback you are getting Take notes as you go – you won’t remember it all later

5. Step Back Protocol for Workshops Step 1: Designate a timekeeper Step 2: Presenter discusses where they are, what kind of feedback would be most helpful (2:30 minutes) Steps 3 – 5: Individual feedback – 2:30 minutes each Step 6: Open discussion (20 minutes for groups of 4, 30 minutes for group of 3)

6. A Few Thoughts From Reading Proposals

7. Proposals Should Have an Hourglass Shape Start with what is broadly significant: For theory For policy, practice or public To a broader substantive question Narrow to the particulars of what you are going to do Need to justify each step of this narrowing Topic sentences of first 3-4 paragraphs are important Broaden back out to talk about significance/implications

8. Literature “Review” Should Lead to Research Questions As we talked about last week, literature “reviews” should be more like arguments about what is missing from the literature and why it matters Lit review should lead into research question Put it after and not before Research question should then bridge to analytic strategy

9. Have an Analytic Strategy An analytic strategy links data, methods, and analysis (everything after the lit review and before the implications) What it’s not: “validity checks, etic and emic coding” boilerplate. NO BOILERPLATE! What it is: A detailed argument for each decision you are making Sampling, coding, and any other choices in your study Nested decisions – need to justify the big ones and the small ones.

10. Have an Analytic Strategy: An Example Should I use focus groups or individual interviews? Focus groups – Strengths includes allowing respondents to build on one another, draw on common reference points, include more participants in less time Interviews – Hear individual voices in more detail, allows for more divergence among voices Which to choose depends on the goals of the study Since I am interested in tracking individual teachers reflections on their own practice, I chose to do individual interviews Since I am interested in understanding how teachers interpret common themes at the school, I chose to do small focus groups

11. Good Analytic Strategies Often Employ Grounded Theory Essentially you are trying to generate a theory, a set of ideas about how the world works in a particular domain Generate hypotheses on the basis of initial data collection Choose subsequent cases for their potential to confirm or disconfirm preliminary hypotheses (purposive sampling) You have reached saturation when new cases don’t yield any new information

12. Grounded Theory: An Example Studying “deeper learning” – efforts to produce cognitively ambitious instruction Visited/researched 12 schools recommended for deeper learning, but only 2 seem to realize it with consistency Hypothesis 1: American schools on the whole can’t realize DL b/c teachers don’t know how/sector isn’t oriented to doing so. Hypothesis 2: Schools for poor and working class kids tend to emphasize rote skills; schools for middle and upper middle class kids are more oriented towards deeper learning. Grounded theory: Examine some schools which serve middle and upper middle class kids and see what kind of teaching/learning goes on there