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(full text) Every student—and educator, too—needs a trusted person who will ask provocative questions and offer helpful critiques. You are seated in the darkened “dilating” room, waiting for the ophthalmologist to bring you into the office. The routine is familiar. Sit in the chair. Place your forehead against the machine. Tell whether you see the letters better or worse as the doctor changes the focusing lenses. This could be an analogy for assessment. It is only when you change the lens through which you view student learning—or your own practice—that you discover whether a new focus is better or worse. But if you never change the lens, you limit your vision. Sometimes your frustration mounts and you ask, “Can't you just tell me the right prescription?” Furthermore, you need another person to continually change your focus, pushing you to look through multiple lenses in order to find that “just right” fit for you, the ultimate owner of the glasses. But it is not entirely a matter of science. It requires the subjective perspective, “Which looks better or worse to you?” As we work to restructure schools, we must increasingly ask the right questions and collect the appropriate evidence; we are constantly refocusing our work. The visit to the ophthalmologist suggests that no one perspective on student learning will be sufficient to assess a student's capabilities and performances. It might also suggest that assessment feedback should provide as clear a vision as possible about the learning performance in the eyes of the learner. And, it illustrates how assessment requires someone who will provide new lenses through which learners can refocus on their work, namely, a critical friend. Critical Friends The role of critical friend has been introduced in many school systems that see themselves as learning organizations and know that learning requires assessment feedback (Senge 1990). A critical friend provides such feedback to an individual—a student, a teacher, or an administrator—or to a group. A critical friend, as the name suggests, is a trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critique of a person's work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work. Because the concept of critique often carries negative baggage, a critical friendship requires trust and a formal process. Many people equate critique with judgment, and when someone offers criticism, they brace themselves for negative comments. We often forget that Bloom refers to critique as a part of evaluation, the highest order of thinking (Bloom et al. 1956). Critical friendships, therefore, must begin through building trust. The person or group needs to feel that the friend will: be clear about the nature of the relationship, and not use it for evaluation or judgment; listen well: clarifying ideas, encouraging specificity, and taking time to fully understand what is being presented; offer value judgments only upon request from the learner; respond to the learner's work with integrity; and be an advocate for the success of the work.   The Critical Friends Process Once trust has been established, the critical friend and the learner meet together in a conference. Time for this conference is flexible, but we found it useful to limit the conference to 20 minutes. (Once critical friends are accustomed to the structure, the time may be shortened.) One successful process to facilitate conversation is the following: The learner describes a practice and requests feedback. For example, a teacher might describe a new problem-solving technique, or a student might describe a project being considered. The critical friend asks questions in order to understand the practice described and to clarify the context in which the practice takes place. For example, the friend may ask the learner, “How much time did you allow for the students to do problem solving?” or “What do you hope other people will learn from your project?” The learner sets desired outcomes for this conference. This allows the learner to be in control of the feedback. The critical friend provides feedback about what seems significant about the practice. This feedback provides more than cursory praise; it provides a lens that helps to elevate the work. For example, the teacher's critical friend might say, “I think it's significant that you're asking students to do problem solving because it will help them become more self-directed.” The student's critical friend might say, “I think your project will be significant because you are trying to bring a new insight into the way people have understood the changing role of women in the United States.“ The critical friend raises questions and critiques the work, nudging the learner to see the project from different perspectives. Typical queries might be, “What does the evidence from your students' work indicate to you about their capacity to do problem solving?” or “When you do this project, how will you help others follow your presentation?” One 2nd grade student said to his partner, “You might want to glue the objects. It needs to be neater.” Both participants reflect and write. The learner writes notes on the conference—an opportunity to think about points and suggestions raised. For example, the learner may reflect on questions such as, Will changes make this work better or worse? What have I learned from this refocusing process? The critical friend writes to the learner with suggestions or advice that seem appropriate to the desired outcome. This part of the process is different from typical feedback situations in that the learner does not have to respond or make any decisions on the basis of the feedback. Instead, the learner reflects on the feedback without needing to defend the work to the critic.   Critical Friends in Many Settings Critical friends are useful in various educational situations: in classrooms, in staff development meetings, and between administrators. In the classroom. Students use the critical friends process in the classroom for feedback on their writing, project work, and oral presentations. The process provides a formal way for students to interact about the substantive quality of their work. They read one another's texts as peer editors and critics. Their conferences make the role of assessor part of the role of learner. In staff development. Teachers use critical friends to plan and reflect on their own professional development. A critical friends group can consist of as many as six people who meet and share practices, perhaps every other week. Some teachers do this during their planning time. Although only one person may have time to share a practice in each meeting, instead of the usual show-and-tell sharing, the critical friends process allows teachers to understand one another's work at a deeper level. Between administrators. Administrators often find themselves too busy to reflect on their practices. In addition, they are isolated from one another. To counteract these tendencies, some administrators have designed critical friendships into their working relationships, calling upon colleagues for critique. One superintendent called upon her board from time to time to be her critical friends. The purpose of this new role of critical friend in assessment is to provide a context in which people receive both critical and supportive responses to their work. For example, a superintendent was recently called to make a presentation to her board. She was warned that certain members of the board were difficult. When she entered the meeting, the superintendent said that she hoped the board would not sit as a panel of judges but rather as a group of critical friends who would help her ask the best possible evaluation questions for the proposed project. The board, taken off guard, responded favorably. During reflection time, members were able to offer their concerns. As a result, in the privacy of the superintendent's own reflection, she was able to re-assess her work in light of the issues that were raised. The art of criticism is often overlooked in school life. In theater, literature, and dance, a good critic can maintain and elevate the standards of performance. In fact, most performing artists have an outside editor built into their work, and over time, they internalize criticism sufficiently so that they are able to become more sharply self-evaluative (Perkins 1991). Introducing the role of critical friends into the layers of a school system will build a greater capacity for self-evaluation as well as open-mindedness to the constructive thinking of others. As we begin to look through many lenses, we learn to ask the question, “Better or worse?” Critical friends help us change our lenses and ask this question. References Bloom, B. S. et al. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay. Perkins, D. N. (1991). “What Creative Thinking Is.” In Developing Minds: Vol. 1. Rev. ed., edited by A. L. Costa. Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Senge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday.

(Extract from the beginning) Co-operative inquiry is a way of working with other people who have similar concerns and interests to yourself, in order to: • Understand your world, make sense of your life and develop new and creative ways of looking at things. • Learn how to act to change things you may want to change and find out how to do things betterii . Research is usually thought of as something done by people in universities and research institutes. There is a researcher who has all the ideas, and who then studies other people by observing them, asking them questions, or by designing experiments. The trouble with this kind of way of doing research is that there is often very little connection between the researcher's thinking and the concerns and experiences of the people who are actually involved. People are treated as passive subjects rather than as active agents. We believe that good research is research conducted with people rather than on people. We believe that ordinary people are quite capable of developing their own ideas and can work together in a co-operative inquiry group to see if these ideas make sense of their world and work in practice.

This working paper provides an introduction to the use of video for research. It maps the scope and use of video for research and demonstrates that video is a significant resource for many contemporary social researchers across a range of fields. The different uses of video are mapped including its use in participatory research, videography, video interviews, the analysis of existing videos, and video based fieldwork. The key qualities and features of video as a research tool and video data are outlined and described in relation to the different potentials and constraints of video for social research. The many considerations that video raises for social researchers are discussed, including what is the status of video data, when does video become data, to what extent do video recordings reflect, distort or remediate social events? The paper provides an introduction to the theoretical and practical issues and decisions involved in setting up a video based study including the choice of camera, camera position and use, processes of logging, sampling, coding and transcribing video data. It provides some exercises in relation to video data collection, as well as a list of suggested further readings and an extensive bibliography.

A blog entry on my learning theory concept map including commentary from readers.

(full text) RT HON CHRIS SMITH MP Labour Member of Parliament for Islington South and Finsbury HOUSE OF COMMONS LONDON SW1A QAA Telephone 020-7219 5119 Fax 020-7219 5820 Professor Stephen Heppell Ultralab Anglia Polytechnic University Victoria Road South Chelmsford Essex CM1 1LL 8 April 2002 Dear Stephen, Ultraversity It was a pleasure (as always) to see you again recently, and to hear about your rather exciting plans. I've since had a chance to read through the draft document you kindly left me with, and to think further about the ideas you are putting together. It seems to me that you have included three brilliant ideas in the document. First, the entire focus of the proposal on a teaching/learning vehicle that deliberately sets out to "reach the people that normal residential universities can't". Second, the "exhibition", peer-reviewed, as the final test for students. And third, the use of mentors, many of them part-time or voluntary or with a lifetime of experience to share, as teachers. These are new, and winning, ideas. It also seems to me that there are some parts of the vision set out in the document that still lack clarity. How does the actual learning happen?: will it be by internal discussion, by dialogue/debate between numbers of people, by the presentation of papers, by individual tuition, by testing of some kind during the whole of a course - or by a mixture of methods? It would be good to have some of this spelt out. How can the teaching or learning be guaranteed to be of a sufficiently high standard? Where are the measurements of excellence to come from? It must, after all, be more than just one number of people talking - by however sophisticated their technological means - to another number of people. And how is the whole thing to be financed? These are some initial reactions, meant to be helpful. I‘d be interested to talk further as your plans crystallise. The more I think about it, the more essential a very positive attitude from DfES becomes. With best wishes, Rt Hon Chris Smith MP

A letter expressing support for the Ultraversity Project.

(full text) My wife, Joan Bliss, who has died aged 74, was remarkable for the sheer determination with which she made a successful and happy life out of very dismal early prospects, a story told in her 2009 memoir, A Path Made By Walking. She was born into a working-class family in Fulham, south-west London, who were bombed out in the blitz. Her father caught mumps and died when Joan was six. Despite missing much primary schooling, she won a grammar school place, but her mother then withdrew her at the age of 16. Joan left home and took a few secretarial jobs, but wished to travel and hoped for better opportunities. Aged 19, she went to France with £20 in her pocket, and in one year passed all the exams needed to enter the University of Geneva, where she studied child development with the psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget appointed Joan to his staff while she was only a second-year undergraduate, and she worked with him until he retired, in 1971. In the late 1960s she also helped to set up the Centre for Child Development and Education in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), a country she came to love dearly. After Piaget's retirement, she moved back to Britain to work at the centre for science and mathematics education at Chelsea College, south-west London. Her three books, Checking Up I, II and III (published 1971-73) were early examples of "formative assessment" aimed at helping teachers to see what children next needed to do in order to learn. In the 1980s Joan founded the interdisciplinary and inter-institutional London Mental Models Group, bringing together science educators, psychologists, linguists and computer scientists to learn from one another. It was her enthusiasm and fascination with people and ideas that held this unusual group together for more than a decade, and helped it to win funding in the UK and in Europe. In 1996 she became professor and dean of education at Sussex University, retiring in 2005. Joan lectured and taught research methods around the world. It is for her personal qualities that Joan will chiefly be remembered. She combined warmth, joyousness and enthusiasm for life with great directness and strength of character. Always to be found helping someone, she knew exactly what she felt, and never concealed it from anyone. She is survived by me, three stepchildren and her sister.

Rupert Wegerif and Neil Mercer  question the relevance of neo-Vygotskian theory to the study  of peer talk  and propose a framework for the study of peer talk which, they claim, goes  beyond some of the limitations of neo-Vygotskian theory. This framework is called 'dialogical'  because it is based on a characterisation of types of interactive dialogue. The schema of three  types of talk introduced by Eunice Fisher is taken up and elaborated,  in order to argue that these three types of talk reflect basic possibilities in the ways in which  speakers of similar social and educational status can relate to each other in dialogue. Finally  Wegerif and Mercer offer an analysis of the types of talk, using four distinct levels of  description running from the interpretation of the fundamental orientation of the talk through  to the level of surface language features such as key words.