Argument is central to all reasoning. Life is a constant attempt to make sense of one event after another – whether it is why your football team lost, why Walt Whitman is considered a great poet, or whether you should buy an electric car. In all cases, arguments will be made for disparate views which will be supported by reasoning or evidence.
Exploratory research is at the beginning of the evidence-building continuum. Mike Steele, the current DRK-12 program lead, describes Exploratory projects as research to “establish the basis and development of an intervention. They explore relationships between design features and outcomes and must have a conceptual framework or theory of action grounded in the literature. Exploratory projects need to provide some evidence of factors associated with learning outcomes.”
In the spring of 2018, I began recording and studying the use of 360 video for mathematics teacher education with my colleague Rick Ferdig. Following a pilot study, we were fortunate to receive funding from NSF to explore the potential of this medium to facilitate teachers’ professional knowledge and noticing.
Ensuring that all students have substantive opportunities to engage in equitable sensemaking within STEM classrooms is critically important. But for teachers to learn how to create and maintain this kind of classroom culture, they need opportunities to engage in repeated practice where they can refine their instructional decision-making and capabilities.
There's an old saying that interesting things happen at boundaries: Where the land meets the ocean, great seaports arise. Where nation borders nation, new cultures and languages arise. And at the thin boundary where earth meets sky, life emerges.
It can be a challenge to plan a conference session that effectively engages panelists from different institutions and research backgrounds. The panelists may or may not know one another, or one another’s work. How do you plan for a dialogue that showcases each panelist and their work while also highlighting areas of overlapping interest? Here are a session designer’s strategies as remarked upon by the panelists involved in the session.
