Day 3: Chapter 5 gets outlined

The goal today was to take this model of how teachers learn to teach:


Clark and Hollingsworth's (2002) Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (IMPG)

And manhandle it until it conformed to this model of how I build technology-enhanced training systems:


Gerritsen, Zimmerman, & Ogan (in press) Planning/Action/Reflection model

It's not impossible, but it's not easy. The point I want to make with this chapter is that there are some really helpful ideas in the IMPG, but that it (a) doesn't really tell us how to deliver training, and (b) sort of falls apart if any of its components are missing. So take this view of the higher education classroom, where there is almost no incentive to get training or to reflect on your teaching:



The red lines show the missing components. This is pretty much the case throughout colleges and universities, where people teach because they know the content, not because they have teaching skills.

Without training and reflection, there is basically no chance that an instructor is going to spontaneously get better. Some of them do, and some of them are naturally awesome, but for those that struggle (like I do), and don't have time to seek out support on their own, there needs to be something else in place.

Hence my cycle of planning, action and reflection. I won't get into what that is now. I'll just say that I hope this chapter can show how the needs of the actual classroom, as identified by the IMPG, can be addressed by my framework.

843 words on the outline today, with a fair bit of editing to yesterday's 268. At any rate, the first pass of the outline is done. I am pretty sure it's confusing and hand wavy. Luckily I have advisors who are smarter than I am that can look at it.

Tomorrow I begin drafting Chapter 2: Context of the Research. That's just the fancy name I gave to the related works chapter.