 Hi, my name is Tracy Tokahama-Spinoza and this is a video to give you a broad overview of our course on Applying Mind-Brain Education Science to Action Research in Your Classrooms Today we want to give you a broad overview of the course We want to introduce the teaching staff and we'll talk a bit about the organizational structure of the course in each module So in this course, we have nine main objectives First we want you to learn how researching can help you make better evidence-based decisions and to do that We want you to appreciate how asking the right kinds of questions can lead to better teaching outcomes as well as learn how we can Narrow down and identify and use key words to conduct better searches on Google Scholar to find Evidence and up-to-date information about the questions in our field this in general then means that we're improving broader research skills and habituating ways of approaching problems in education in a way that you'll be able to use long after this course finishes Another perhaps deeper vision of this is to revisit Bloom's taxonomy Understand these different levels of thinking of just recognizing or understanding information to being able to apply it then to get to this Higher and more creative level where you're analyzing the information and coming up with something maybe new or different or a new way to approach the information And we're also doing this within a core structure because while we will be doing a lot of Accompaniment one-on-one what we really hope to do is to have bi-weekly group meetings where we're able to share our Progress and to celebrate each other's Advances with these research steps as we resolve some of the bigger issues in our classrooms We also realize you can get general information about action research for free in an online MOOC for example But this is a very different approach to learning research skills We really want to personalize this learning experience to understand What are your specific needs in these areas and how do they apply to your specific problems in the classroom? And this also means habituating the documentation of Information that we come across and learning about the tools you can use to organize and order all of the great information You come across finally we want to return to this real joy I mean why are we all teachers in the first place? And I'd suggest that it's because we realize there's a lot to be done here And the students in our classrooms are all so unique and there's so much to learn about and there's so much to understand and apply from the learning sciences That we're just beginning to scratch the surface of approaching educational challenges with this lens And so what we'd like to do is to make that enjoyable fun It should be a real kick to say well, I'm learning and I'm loving what I'm doing I love my profession. We hope that we can sustain that natural joy We have for the work that we do but we hope that over the course of the semester we'll be able to Nurture our own curiosities about the teaching process and and learn to follow an organized process of inquiry and discovery Where we'll be able to document and then use that information to become even better professionals This means it'll be very clear exactly how we approach action research And we hope this leads to a greater pride in our teaching profession and especially appreciating the complexity of what goes on in the messiness of our classrooms and why Research in the education field is so delicate and so complicated But also within our grasp every one of us can do it and we should all learn to do it in order to be better researcher Practitioners and we think this is true based on two big premises The first is that we know that teachers do more experiments in a day than a neuroscientist will complete in a lifetime The main difference is that a neuroscientist really regularly and meticulously document their whole practice Whereas we are on the fly all the time as teachers trying to attend to multiple needs at the same time This means it's clear that teachers know how to do research What we don't do so well is document what we do and those are some of the skill sets that we're going to be working on this semester The second premise is that we believe that research should You know naturally emerge from your own natural curious space, right? And so that we want you to choose a topic it can be academic or it can be social emotionally driven But choose something that's of interest to you something you want to know and will guide you in that research process We do this basically through a gap analysis Just figure out, you know, where am I right now and where is it? I want to be and then understand that gap, right What do I need to do to fill in that gap so that I can actually get to where I want to be? Some examples of questions that can come up are that, you know, I want my students to read more for pleasure Or I want to personalize my instruction time or I want to reduce Bullying in my class or to understand how the brain approaches math problems, for example Or I want to employ a different kind of assessment I want to evaluate product and process and progress throughout the school year or I just want to understand the dyslexic brain Or I want to work with teens to help them become better decision makers. There are a myriad of ideas These are just scratching the surface and you personally will drive the agenda of this class by deciding what it is that you want to know Where is it that you want to be? So for those of you who've taken the class with us before you know all of the modules have the exact same format It's a flipped classroom with a synchronous meeting time Which means that you watch a video before you come to class You're also asked to take a quiz and you can take that as many times as you like We really don't care We just want you to really be sure you know all of the vocabulary and the key concepts of this particular unit, right? Then you should respond to a discussion board prompt That's related to the content topic of the week and then you can dive into what we call bundles These are many libraries on each topic and you can review as many as you like To get more in-depth knowledge about the topic of the week Then you come to the class. So a b c d those are things that you do before you come to the live class So that when we're in the live class together, we can really just pull that apart and see how it applies to your real life And your real classroom So while we will have prompts in these live classes What we're looking for is for you to come and get the answers you need to be able to advance your own research project After we have the live class you complete a three two one reflection You know through things you didn't know before we have the class two things that you're curious about And one thing you may change in your personal or private practice based on the information we shared Then again after the class you can respond to the other learners on the discussion board And if you want to you can retake the quiz as many times as you'd like So basically every single one of those eight modules which is spread out over 16 weeks We'll have the exact same format because we realize you are busy people There's a lot to do and a lot of things that are in research have to be done More than one on one level the synchronous class with the entire group meets only for one hour every two weeks Although we will have multiple individual meetings scheduled with you throughout the semester as well So every single module they will have those things that we mentioned before the quizzes the discussion boards And you'll be asked to submit pieces you'll inch towards the completion of your project as we go along I'll describe that in just a second And each of those pieces is graded and you get feedback along the way You're asked to keep a documentation of this information in the e-portfolio that's on our platform In order to measure your progress and you can really see you know Where did you start from? How did your ideas evolve so that you can understand your own research process a little bit better There'll be multiple formats to do this in the assignments that we're asking you to do But you can also do online journals or video documentation of your own progress So who are we? I'm Tracy Takahame Spinoza. This is Cynthia Borja who will be Working with me on this class. These are pictures of my own brain Yes, I faked a sinus infection so I could actually see what my own brain looked like so Basically philosophically speaking I believe that the first rule of education is the same as medicine which is to do no harm So this is why we firmly believe in evidence-based practice So a lot of the things we do in classrooms we do without actually understanding why they work or why they should work Or if there's any evidence at all behind them and that's part of the motivation for doing this course I also think that the brain is pretty complicated and that's okay We as teachers should actually own that and celebrate that and be proud of the fact that we work with the most complicated organism in the universe Every single day. That's really cool, right? And finally, I hope this doesn't frustrate people in the class But I don't think my job is to answer lots of questions I think my job is to help you formulate better questions and answer them yourself So we'll spend a lot of time doing a lot of socratic dialogue a lot of discussion back and forth about how to improve our practices But hopefully it's guided and led by you and your own inquiry. So hopefully that's the positive way to approach this My colleague Cynthia Borca. She used to be the dean of psychology at the university of americas in quito ecuador She did her undergraduate work and in the states as well, was in university and compelling And she and I have been working very closely together In connections over the past years trying to motivate a better understanding of all of the learning sciences together So as I mentioned the structure of each module is very much the same But what we'll be doing in each module is different, right? So the topic will be different very first week We're going to have introductions And then we're going to be talking about how to formulate a great research question by asking ourselves You know, what do I want to know? Because if you have a great research question Everything else falls into place without a good research question. We're missing that north And so the first step is to have is to develop that really strong research question from there After the research question we want to explore the literature and broadly speaking This means the research that already exists, right? How can we stand on the shoulders of giants and of what is already established to know something new? The big idea here is not to rehash known material The idea is to know what people already know This is a hard and an easy stage of research because what it tells us really is Sometimes the things we think are unknown are just not known by us Maybe the answer does exist or people have researched it or know things And we just haven't read broadly enough to know this and so the key idea here is to learn how to Identify existing literature in the areas or the problem areas that we're interested in Then we'll talk about how you conduct action research How do you structure these within a classroom setting and really get down to the nitty-gritty parts of it Most of you really already know how to conduct action research The complexity comes in with how do you do that within the dynamics of your own classroom? So the big idea here is to talk about how to personalize that for your particular classroom structure Then we'll look into this very big idea of analysis Which goes way beyond just knowing what other people said in the literature or what we found Those things are just describing What exists right analysis is taking it to that next level of understanding of okay So now now that I have those puzzle pieces and put them all together What is that telling me is that telling me a new story is the problem I thought I had actually a different kind of a problem Okay, so we'll talk about the types of exercises we can do to reach that deeper level of thinking to be able to You know tell that story of what am I discovering now in my research process Then we come to the conclusions. So now that I have this information from my analysis What kinds of conclusions do I have how can I answer my research question? And this leads to a really rich discussion now that I know this What are the other things that are out there that I need to know to continue to to build up my knowledge about this particular topic Then we want to pull all of those different pieces together And this is your whole research project as a whole know how to each of these pieces now fit together And this is also more complicated It sounds because while each piece is really manageable on its own The big idea of unifying them into a single project is to seeing how the question was born of the problem And how the literature search was born of the question and how your methodology Responded to what we already know and how you analyzed what you found in the data gathered in the methodology and how you reached those conclusions All those pieces have to really be coherent and and joined together seamlessly And that's what we'll look at when we talk about the project And then we want to move from the project to your presentation. How can you share this information with other people? So as we know one of the best ways to learn anything is to have a worked model So let me give you an example Let's just say that um, what I want to know is why my students don't read so much for pleasure So I want to know how to increase the quantity and quality of reading that my students do in the class for pleasure Not things that I assigned, okay, so I might generate a kind of a hypothesis I think that students don't read for pleasure because they don't have access to literature They really like so I might formulate a research question How into what extent does promoting free choice of what to read increase the amount of reading that's done Then I go to the literature I'll go to my google scholar search and I'll have to identify keywords based on my research question keywords I'll have to look at reading and pleasure or out of school time or free choice I'll have to come up with certain topics And then plug that into the search and see what kinds of research has already been done on my topic Then I go to design an action research project in my class I'm thinking since if my students can be the ones who can choose the type of literature They read if I'm not limiting them just to the readers that I have in my little classroom library But I can broaden this for example using technology I can design an action research project in which I see if Searches for literature increases by student use as they look for online literature that's available to them And I can measure that both quantitatively by the amount of time they spent looking for the literature and how much time they actually spent Reading as well as qualitatively. I can ask their opinions about how they feel about the literature that they chose I can design these measures and I can collect the data in my class Then I can analyze it and read some conclusions. Well, did it help to give them that free choice? Did they read more because of it? Maybe they read more, but they weren't happier So maybe my question really should have been how do I get them to be excited about reading rather than how do I get them To just read so I can rethink once I've reached that conclusion I can answer my research question and have this discussion about now that I know that this helps or doesn't help What would I do next as far as resolving that particular problem that kids don't read for pleasure in my class I'll pull all of those different pieces together to create a single project This would be a paper basically But then I want to convert that into some kind of a presentation where I can share what I found with my colleagues Sort of to tell them, you know within the context of our schools It seems that this is one thing that I found in my class And maybe to be able to compare and contrast your findings with what is happening in other classes And or to save other people the time of doing this research you can share and say well Actually, I found that free choice really does you know Motivated extra reading or it really doesn't whatever the findings might be So that you can help grow the knowledge base of your entire institution by sharing that in your presentation So basically that's the just the course we really look forward to digging deeper into all of these points when we see you in the live class Thanks a lot