Teachers find best practices through research partnership

Dubbed the Praxis Project, it is a school–university partnership designed to bridge the gap between educational theory and practice. Spanning April 2020 to February 2021, it assembled three groups of three to research pedagogical approaches in teachers’ classrooms. 

These triads consisted of a teacher who provided the classroom context and outlined the problem; a PhD student, who, with their expertise in research methods, helped design and guide the study; and a Master of Teaching (MT) student, who conducted the literature review and gathered data, including student interviews, and performed primary analysis. 

Lincoln Smith, UCC innovation and technology coach, has co-authored a chapter analyzing the effectiveness of this study entitled “Epistemic Authority and School–University Partnerships: Findings from a Collaborative Inquiry,” which was recently published in Learning in a Time of Division, a book exploring teaching practices outside of established norms.  

(His co-authors include Angela Vemic, Sisi Xiao Feng and Danielle Denichaud.)

At UCC, Smith, who formerly taught in the CFL, seeks optimal and alternative methods of educating individual students, and increasing accessibility across the student community.  

Regarding his chapter’s focus, he says, “There’s a common issue with the divide between theory and practice in education because of dynamics and contextual factors, and the human element is central.”

He adds that the challenge of a research project like this is balancing the insight researchers gain through their methods with what teachers learn from daily practice. While each can be helpful to the other, facilitating that can be tricky because, “They’re just not in the same spaces.”   

There is a risk that one party in the triad can assume an inequitable amount of control, but for the exercise to work, the “epistemic authority” must rotate among the teacher and the PhD and MT students. 
 

One of the research projects was in IB math, involving Head of the Upper School Andrew MacDougall.

“His group was digging into a type of problem-solving in which you evaluate a proof that was hard for kids to understand,” Smith explains. “So Andrew’s question was, ‘What are ways of teaching this particular skill that might work better?’”

The second study involved French teacher Sarah Khalanski, who was exploring the way boys feel more at ease expressing their true selves when speaking in a foreign language.

“She did video analysis,” Smith says. “She recorded various conversations and engagements, then compared them to things the students had written. When we started researching the project, she said it allowed her to know her students in a much deeper way than before.” 

The third teacher participant was Geoffrey Mohtadi, who teaches history and English, and whose challenge was developing students’ capacity to constructively receive feedback. “They experimented with how he provided feedback to his students, then the MT student interviewed them about that experience and what worked,” outlines Smith. 

The Praxis Project, he concludes, has exciting implications. 

“It underscores how powerful and transformative engaging in structured inquiry can be when it’s rooted in something relevant for the teacher, and when there’s capacity to do it effectively,” he says. 

He supports the idea of UCC restarting the project, and in general continuing efforts to support teachers’ questions of practice through research, while tapping its connections to outside institutions. He adds that OISE is looking to take the learnings and apply the model to a broad array of public schools, including those in the Toronto District School Board.