Research-Practice Partnerships Supporting Adoption of Active Learning

Challenging the “business as usual” approach to instructional design and professional development is a transactional model of practice change–Research-Practice Partnership (RPP). This approach proposes that adoption requires gaining mutual understanding and involves joint work and shared communication. In turn, joint work requires stakeholders to create new practices that allow for boundary crossings, which often involves mediating tools. This presentation reports on RPP program, consisting of three sequential grants, that have an overarching goal of supporting the integration of evidence-based instruction – i.e., Active Learning – into the pedagogical design and practices of post-secondary instructors. These case studies detail the development of an online platform that allows stakeholders –researchers, teachers and instructional designers– to communicate across boundaries and engage in the joint work of designing solutions that are adapted to varied content and context. We report on a Research Practitioner Partnership (RPP; Coburn & Penuel, 2016) program that has as its goal the integration of evidence-based Active Learning (AL) instruction in higher education. The intervention involves the development of an online platform, and tools, that allows stakeholders –researchers, teachers and instructional designers– to communicate across boundaries and to engage in the joint work of designing solutions that are adapted to their content and context. This case study investigates both the RPP process itself, as well as how the platform and tools developed to accomplish the joint work. In particular, how the tools meditate and bring together principles from research and the documented implementations of practitioners. In turn, the jointly designed tools facilitate the design of new materials and further tools; and, at the same time provide researchers opportunities to examine how the enactment work is achieved. Description of the Intervention Our intervention is an online platform that consists of co-designed instructional resources and frameworks that are part of an AL support program growing out of a networked professional learning community initiative, SALTISE (authors; https://www.saltise.ca/). To make sense of these resources/data, collected from over 30 college and university instructors, we categorized them into an ecology that generates a principled taxonomy of student-centred active learning instruction – approaches, strategies, activities, and scenarios (see Figure 1). Approaches are the most general orienting principles of active learning instruction. They do not describe what the teacher or students will be doing, but rather propose how a pedagogy will unfold e.g., flipped classroom (Tucker, 2012). Strategies are also general, however, they describe specific steps or sequences of tasks (i.e., script) that both teacher and students will engage in. They are grounded in the educational literature and often the focus of research, e.g., peer instruction (PI, Mazur, 1997), jigsaw (Aronson, 2002). Activities, by contrast, are the instructional units that teachers prepare. They are content-laden, specific to a course, thereby, idiosyncratic. In student-centered active learning instruction, we have documented that activities often employ and link together strategies that engage students in joint-work. Lastly, scenarios, bring individual activities together into a coherent sequence that span different time scales i.e., a single lesson, several weeks (a module), or even a semester-long project. Our platform, in addition to presenting this ecology, provides a framework to explore the workflows that make up the AL Activities. The framework works to reveal the relationships between the instructional components that include strategies (with scripts) and tasks that do not have a specified script. They also detail how these components are linked and orchestrated into an Activity. The framework is represented in terms of an annotated workflow that describes when and how the learning unfolds and who is responsible for which actions (Figure 2a). It provides information about each component, in particular, identifying the Strategies involves (Figure 2b) and incorporate the embedded scripts (Figure 2c). Also included is information from the literature along with practical advice on how to implement them (Figure 2d). Strategies are at the heart of the ecology because they describe the “mechanisms” for the engagement – cognitive, socio-cultural (joint work) or psycho-social (motivational). Interestingly, elements of their scripts are also the focus of research. Figure 1. The ecology of instructional units forming a taxonomy within AL pedagogies. In summary, the platform is a principles-based repository of AL learning objects as well as a tool for building new instruction. It is useful to practitioners and researchers on their own. For practitioners, the resources are easily browsed and navigated according to multiple criteria from a practitioner's perspective. Using the research literature to link components with typical problems of practice encountered by instructors (e.g., students not preparing for class) as well as typical general learning objectives (e.g., deeper understanding course content). More importantly, the platform’s social interface promotes networking and identifies practitioners who have extensive experience implementing the AL components and place them in reach of those looking for advice (i.e., potential for sharing of experiences among peers). Thereby, the platform creates an environment that facilitates meaningful engagement with all these resources. For researchers, on the other hand, the platform and framework allow researchers and educational developers to gain insight on and learn from the practice-based knowledge developed by instructors (Dougherty, 2016). Figure 2. The framework describing the instructional activity including the workflow and the activity’s components. App