Diary of a PhD completion: All the feels

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The thane of Cawdor lives. Why do you dress me In borrowed robes? ~ Shakespeare’s Macbeth

In my last post, I described how I felt once I knew that my thesis amendments had been approved by my supervisors. I really didn’t think that this very pointy end of the PhD would be complex. Surely there would be a quiet moment of joy followed by the pop of a champagne cork. Well, I was right about the champagne, but the last week has been more of a rollercoaster than I imagined. It turns out that finishing a doctorate is wound up in some messy identity-entangled feelings. Below, I try to give a sense of what that looked and felt like for me.

My week’s diary of PhD completion went something like this.

Friday: Supervisors sign off on the amended thesis. Form goes to the Dean for university sign off. Elation. Excitement. Light can be seen at the end of the tunnel. Hugs. Champagne. I tell my kids. My 5 year old shouts “Wooohooo! No more PhD!” I remember that I’ve been doing this most of their lives (they were 6 months and 2 years old when I started; now they are 4 and 5).

Saturday and Sunday: Checking and re-checking the thesis, especially the amendments. I fully proof the first and last chapters, line by line, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. Obsess over commas and hyphens, or the lack of commas and hyphens. Wonder why I’m so unable to let go of a document which I’ve been told is done. My husband takes me to lunch on the coast on a glorious day. I drink a bellini. We cheers to the thesis being done.

Monday: Dean signs off on my thesis. It’s through. Accepted. Officially done. I jump up and down. Whooping. Air-punching. Triumph.

Tuesday: I’m still tinkering with the already-approved thesis. I’m haunted by nightmares and daydreams of mistakes existing somewhere in the 300 page document despite it being checked by me, two supervisors and three examiners. Impossible obsession with checking over and over. And over. I keep reminding myself the thesis has been signed off. It is considered doctorate worthy. I save the document as a pdf to stop myself from my compulsive tinkering. I sneak another peek. Ok, maybe more than one.

Wednesday: Wake with a cracking headache, knowing that today is the day I print the final final final copies for permanent binding (buckram cloth! gold letters!). One of which will live on the library shelf (maybe never to be opened). Anxiety builds as I worry that this final copy means there can be no more tinkering. I am overwhelmed by the pressure of printing the tangible final pages. It’s a relinquishing of control. If there are errors, they will be inked there for eternity. I feel increasingly ill as I print and check the final copies of my thesis. I take the box of printed pages in to university and submit them to the library to be sent for final binding. I drive to pick up sick child from school; no time to savour the moment. I upload the thesis document to the university library. Fall into a heap of exhaustion and hollowness. It’s the thesis finishing comedown, an emotional and energetic crumbling, a descent into the post-thesis abyss. I tweet my feelings of emptiness and strangeness. Responses come: yes, the mourning, the crash, the void. Others have felt this, too. I head out for dinner and champagne. Company helps and I’m reminded that – without lab partners, a writing group or colleagues at the university – my journey is mostly in my head. I’ve been the working mama who comes and goes from uni in a blinding flash, working mostly alone, often in the night. It’s good to be out, and to talk about it. And to talk about other things to forget about it.

Thursday: I get word that my thesis is online. There it is, a citation with my name on it, and a downloadable document. My thesis title in black and white. My words out of my head and into the world. My work now in the public realm. Elation again. Pride. And then the crack of the Imposter Syndrome whip. I hadn’t felt it until now. I was perfectly comfortable being a PhD candidate. An eager student. A work in progress. Of course I am still a neophyte. A partially-formed apprentice scholar. I realise I’m almost doctored, but feel unworthy of the title. I know I’ve worked hard for this. My family has both sacrificed and benefited from my doing the PhD; we’ve lived it. I know I’ve walked the path that leads to the ‘Dr’ and the medieval flourish of the Tudor bonnet. Yet I hear Macbeth’s line in my head “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” My sense of identity hasn’t caught up with the reality of finishing the PhD. My new almost-doctor-ness feels ill-fitting. My neverending PhD story is coming to an end. Or is that a beginning? When I started the doctorate I saw its completion as the pinnacle. Now I realise it’s entry level.

Friday: I notice missing Oxford commas in the text. I begin to think about the work I’ve now projected out into the world. I remember how non-traditional my thesis is. That it was risky. That some might be inspired by my novel approach and others bemused or horrified. I reflect on how I have attempted to push at the boundaries of what an acceptable thesis is. I’ve worked within the accepted parameters of a thesis (introduction, literature, method, results, discussion; some use of the distant academic voice). But I’ve also challenged the traditional thesis genre by embracing creativity, shifting voices, and a literary lens as a way to make meaning. I wonder how my attempt to create a text which compels and propels the reader will be received now that it lives outside of my laptop and my head. I’m comforted by accepted journal articles and conference papers which affirm that my work fits somewhere. I breathe.

The ride continues. Maybe soon, I’ll grow into the robes.

all the feels means all the bubbles

all the feels means all the bubbles

How it feels to finish – really finish – a PhD thesis

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No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it. ~ Karl Popper

Yesterday, I watched my supervisors sign the form which declares that I have completed my thesis revisions and adequately addressed the examiners’ reports. In fact, my amendments go over and above those required by the examiners. I’ve taken on plenty of non-compulsory feedback and done some extra editing, so that (as Mullins and Kiley, 2002, put it) my thesis will ‘glow more brightly’ on the library shelf (or online repository).

The reason I’ve been revising more than necessary is that while the thesis is still in my hands and control, my perfectionism has been running rampant. I’ve been waking in the night thinking about the minutest of textual details and having night terrors of opening a freshly bound copy to a jarring typographical error. I’ve been proofing chapters line by line, unable to limit myself to addressing the recommended amendments. But finally, it seems, the thesis is done. Soon I will be notified that I can print the final copies for permanent binding. You know, the glorious ones with buckram covers and golden lettering.

After my final supervision meeting, in which the thesis was finished and signed off on, I tweeted out that I felt somewhere between these images …

Jay Gatsby & Frodo Baggins as metaphors for doctoral completion

Jay Gatsby & Frodo Baggins as metaphors for doctoral completion

Jay Gatsby is an interesting analogy for someone at the end of the doctoral journey. Perhaps there’s a celebratory note, glorification of the doctorate, the pursuit of greatness, party-like excitement, or even a smugness to completing the PhD. But Gatsby was the ultimate imposter who re-invented his identity. He pursued an outward appearance that belied his own past and insecurities. Imposter syndrome can encroach into the nearly-doctored or newly-doctored persona. Do I deserve this? Do others know my limitations? Was my dissertation really enough to warrant a PhD? Am I worthy of the title ‘Dr’?

Frodo Baggins can also provide a lens for reflection on finishing the thesis. In some ways the PhD can seem like the quest to return the ring to the fires of Mordor. Frodo Baggins, as the ring-bearer tasked with a seemingly impossible mission, is central to the job. He emerges emotional, exhausted and battle weary. But it’s the multi-membered fellowship, and additional others supporting them, which work together for ultimate success. Luck and coincidence play a part, too. And persistence. Frodo doesn’t have magical powers or super strength or skill. He is ordinary. But he has persistence, grit, stick-to-it-iveness. In the PhD, the doctoral researcher is central to the successful completion of the task. They need to work through challenges, persist despite being knocked down, move onwards even when hitting a dead end or sinking into a swamp. But they cannot do it alone. Supervisors, family, friends and others are critical to completion.

Additionally, at the Crack of Doom Frodo struggles to release the ring. He has become attached to it. So while his friends fight armies of evil, he stands at the precipice of the end of his quest, above the fires of Mount Doom, unable to let go of the thing which he has carried, like an ever-heavier burden, for so long. Of course not all doctorates feel like a burden. One can love the PhD, but maybe even this fondness can have a Stockholm Syndrome type attachment; we learn to feel comfortable in capture. I feel a sadness that my PhD is coming to an end. It’s hard to let it go.

And when is a piece of writing finished? Ninna Meier recently explored the unfinishedness of writing, the layering of writerly thinking and identity, and the ways that reviewers and co-authors help to move a piece of writing forward. She talks about revisiting earlier writing and being appalled at its unfinishedness. How, she asks, could her past-writer-self have thought it was ok when her present-writer-self is surprised and horrified?

My thesis felt finished when I submitted it for examination, but after space and time away from it, along with the lens of examiners’ comments, I was able to see it as still requiring work. Now, after the amendments have been done, it has been signed off on as complete and worthy of the doctorate. No doubt, however, my future writer self will look back in surprise that I ever thought it was ok. I will see glaring naivety and cringe worthy phrasing. I can already see a (somewhat experimental and diversionary) paragraph which might well cause my future writer self to wince, but for now I’m attached to leaving it in.

Although the PhD can feel never ending, it does end. For me, the work is done. So, for now, while I wait for the wheel of academia to slowly turn, for university administration to do its administering, I wait, work, write papers, read trashy fiction. And drink champagne. I finally feel like I’ve hit a milestone worth stopping to celebrate, no matter what my future self might think. Next will come more steps: final printing, binding, the floppy velvet hat and the two letters in front of my name. Then achievement will really be unlocked.

The PhD as collaborative work not lone journey

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light at the end of the tunnel

light at the end of the tunnel (taken with an iPhone & Olloclip in an old train tunnel)

though the road is rocky / sure feels good to me ~ Bob Marley

Sometimes my PhD has felt like a solitary slog, with long isolated times deep in the subterranean thesis cave. At times of intellectual and emotional struggle, the embers of self-belief and persistence can seem to be dying in the darkness and enormity of the work at hand. The sounds of keystrokes and the scratching of pen on paper echo through seemingly empty caverns. Hands knead and brows furrow in the silence. Fist-pump moments of success swirl in a vortex of separateness. The occasional tweet is sent out as a kind of SOS, with hashtags punctuating the despair or grim solitude; #amwriting #sendhelp #needcoffee #phdchat.

The feeling of isolation is partly why I am so grateful when anyone asks about my PhD. I know that others don’t like being asked about their progress on what is a long process seemingly without an end. But for me, “How’s it going?” becomes an invitation to bring my experiences out from inside my head and make them real through talk. Sharing with someone who seems interested is a relief. I am awash with gratefulness for those who have been willing to hear about my PhD work.

In fact the PhD is not a solo effort, but collaborative, work. It is shaped by personal and supervisory relationships, by reading, by feedback, and by the examination process. As I do my post-examination thesis revisions, I’m aware that the final document, while stamped with my name, only exists in its final form because of the fluid interactions, over years, with others.

I have been influenced by the words and work of scholars (there are 376 references in my reference list at last count). In this way, my work emerges out of, situates itself alongside, or reacts against, the work of others. Research is academic conversation.

I have read the blogged experiences of others and the advice of online academics, which have shaped my understanding of my own experiences. People I know through social media have shown support and engaged me in conversation.

My supervisors have read my work, given feedback, and coached me through challenges. My mum read my work, especially early on, and helped me to talk about and think through my ideas. My research proposal panel provided advice and feedback on the direction I intended to take. Editors and peer reviewers, from journals and conferences, have commented on the ways in which I have shared my doctoral work through the writing of academic papers. Conference goers have listened to me present and engaged me in conversation about my work, or asked questions which have helped me think it through. My examiners have provided feedback to which I am currently responding.

So whose work is the PhD? Mine, all mine? Not really. The words are those I have written but on which others have made comment. The sweat and tears on the page are mine, but informed and supported by the words and actions of others. A PhD thesis is indelibly shaped by webs of influence. As Pat Thomson points out, the PhD is not a wholly individualistic journey, but a social and relational one. Even a political one. Whose is the responsibility for a candidate’s progress, success or failure, and the quality of the final thesis?

As I finish up my post-examination amendments, I’m aware that the text I’m presenting to the world is what it is because of the messy web of influences on me, my work and my writing. The one page of acknowledgements seems to be hardly enough to communicate the social networked nature of a dissertation.

 

Doing PhD revisions: The last thesis embrace

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Gustav Klimt's 'Der Kuss', 1908 http://www.klimt.com/en/gallery/women.html

Gustav Klimt’s ‘Der Kuss’, 1908 http://www.klimt.com/en/gallery/women.html

This week I received news that my PhD will be awarded, subject to changes to my thesis. Wahoo! What a relief after months of examination limbo.

The requirement to address examiner comments is interchangeably referred to as doing corrections, amendments or revisions to the thesis. The actual process from receiving the official letter and examiners’ reports goes like this at my Australian university. Under the direction of my supervisors, I am to address the recommendations suggested in the examiners’ reports. When my supervisors and I are happy that all comments have been considered and any relevant changes made, we can sign off that it’s been done. This needs to be documented in the kind of table sent to journal editors outlining recommendation, response, and any resulting change to the text. Our response to the examiners’ reports then goes to the Dean, for sign off at that level. Then I’ll be notified that I can print my thesis and lodge it at the library for binding (one for me, one for the university library, one for each of my supervisors, and any more I fancy). I also need to submit to the library a digital copy of the thesis for the online repository of university theses. At this point my degree can be tabled at the university’s appropriate council (when they next meet after all these steps) at which I will be conferred the degree: PhD me!

While it is tempting to feel like getting revisions recommended in the examiners’ reports is some kind of failure, I am grateful to my examiners for their advice. I thought I wanted the ‘Gold star! Perfect work! Here, have a PhD without as much as a corrected typo!’ response (hey, who wouldn’t?), but of course it turns out that drawing on the expertise of three experienced academics will help me to strengthen my work before it goes out into the world and onto the interweb plastered with my name.

Some examiner comments were glowing (yay!). Others confirmed what was original about my work (phew!). There were some comments which were a delight to read and a wonderful affirmation of my thinking, researching and writing. There were no referencing errors and only a couple of typos in the 300 odd pages, despite me choosing to edit the work myself rather than employ a copy editor to check it for me.

Some of the examiners’ comments pointed towards the need for me to clarify areas of the thesis. These comments showed me the importance of the first chapter in setting up the readers’ expectations for the thesis. My thesis takes a novel approach (no doubt not to everyone’s taste and probably unexpected to many thesis readers) so I am doing some work on the first page of the introduction and elsewhere to make my approach clear. I can see that I need to help the reader know what to expect – or as one examiner said, ‘pre-imagine’ – the journey on which my thesis will take them.

Other examiner comments were around the need to cite less and take on the role of expert more in my closing chapters. I have struggled with that before (you can read about it here and here) and it seems I can move my closing chapters more convincingly towards authority and, as one examiner put it, audaciousness. This is all part of the PhD as identity work; becoming a researcher, becoming a writer, becoming a scholar. This seems to me an ongoing process of self reimagining. As we rework our scholarly texts, we rewrite our scholarly identities. We write ourselves through our work. I write myself into being.

Thesis corrections are an exercise in considering feedback. It requires being open to seeing our work through others’ eyes and working to apply that understanding to strengthen the text, and to our writing of future academic texts. If someone has misunderstood something, how can I make it clearer? If someone has suggested a new direction or additional layer of analysis, how might I consider that for now, or for the future? If someone has a criticism, how might I present a response or strengthen my case? It’s important to (do our best to) put any emotion or attachment aside and consider how expertise, and even criticism, from others might help us to develop our scholarly thinking, our research method and our academic writing.

Responding to reviewer comments for academic journals has given me some practice at applying professional distance to revisions, but thesis corrections are different. While a journal article often goes back to the reviewers for re-reading, the PhD thesis (unless required to be re-examined) does not go back to examiners for another look. The PhD candidate awarded amendments without re-examination needs to engage with, consider and respond to all examiner recommendations. But the candidate, as soon-to-be-doctored researcher and expert in their own research, can make decisions (under the advisement of their supervisors) on what is appropriate for their thesis. As Thesis Whisperer Inger Mewburn says in her post about doing thesis amendments, the examiner reports are suggestions, not a shopping list.

Personally, I have found this opportunity to get back into my thesis (albeit, briefly!) as a moment to luxuriate for the last time in an experience which I have found so personally rewarding. While, as wishcrys (Crystal Abidin) writes recently, it can be a lonely and seemingly neverending road, I resonate too with this post by almost-double-doctored Carloyn Ee on feeling misty-eyed fondness for the PhD experience. As a working mother of small children who has been doing a PhD in the ‘spare’ moments of my life, it has been an indulgence and a pleasure. That’s not to say it has been easy (it hasn’t) or that life hasn’t gotten in the way (it has). But my PhD has been an artistic endeavour and a love affair. This is my last embrace and I am enjoying it!

 

The Danielson Framework for Teaching as tool for professional reflection and conversation

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2013 Danielson Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument cover

2013 Danielson Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument cover

The Framework for Teaching is a research-based set of components of instruction, aligned to the INTASC standards, and grounded in a constructivist view of learning and teaching. The complex activity of teaching is divided into 22 components (and 76 smaller elements) clustered into four domains of teaching responsibility. ~ Danielson Group website

I have spent a lot of time blogging about the coaching part of my school’s coaching model and some outlining the specifics of the model and the ways we use lesson data. I’ve spent less time talking about why and how we use Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching as a tool for professional reflection and conversation. In this post, I’ll illuminate some of the reasons for adopting the Framework and the ways in which we use it at my Australian school.

Danielson’s Framework—explained in the most detail in Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 2008)—provides a map of what excellence in teaching might look like, providing a set of shared, explicit descriptors. Grounded in research, it is a thorough, multi-layered definition of good teaching which identifies a comprehensive range of teacher responsibilities. The Framework is intended to be part of transparent, active processes such as teacher reflection, professional inquiry, classroom observations, mentoring, coaching, and Human Resources processes such as recruitment, evaluation of teacher performance and appraisal. The use of such a framework depersonalises conversations about teaching, focusing discussion on specific elements of practice, rather than on the individual. It provides a shared, explicit set of descriptors.

The Framework clusters its twenty two components of teaching into four domains of teacher responsibility:

    • Domain 1: Planning and Preparation
    • Domain 2: The Classroom Environment
    • Domain 3: Instruction
    • Domain 4: Professional Responsibilities

The components are intended to be applicable to diverse settings and independent of any particular teaching methodology. Whilst these components are separated for the purpose of the Framework, they are acknowledged as interrelated parts of a complex holistic endeavour. In action, the Framework is more web-like than grid-like. This is reflected in the choice of cover artwork for The Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument (Danielson, 2013) which shows the four domains as an intersecting Venn diagram.

The Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project studied 23,000 lessons of 3,000 teacher volunteers in six USA urban school districts in order to investigate how teacher practice affects student achievement. It found that the Framework:

  • was positively associated with student achievement gains;
  • focused observers’ attention on specific aspects of teaching practice;
  • established common evidentiary standards for each level of practice; and
  • created a common vocabulary for pursuing a shared vision of effective instruction.

The project also concluded that, when implementing an instrument for teacher  evaluation (or, in our case, reflection and growth):

  • clear standards and multiple observations are required when evaluating a teacher’s practice;
  • evaluation systems should include multiple measures;
  • combining observation scores with evidence of student achievement gains and student feedback improved predictive power and reliability and identified teachers with larger gains on state tests; and
  • the true promise of classroom observations is the potential to identify strengths and address specific weaknesses in teachers’ practice.

It was our reading—of Kane and Staiger’s (2012) Measures of Effective Teaching research paper and Sartain, Stoelinga and Brown’s (2011) report on Chicago’s implementation of the Danielson Framework, as part of its Excellence in Teaching Pilot—which influenced the design of our observation model in which each teacher has four 20 minute observations per annual cycle of coaching.

For us, using Danielson is about each teacher looking at specific lesson data at a particular moment in time, and interrogating where the evidence places that data against Danielson’s framework. In any one observation, teachers’ data might be rated (by themselves, or as calibrated with a coach or manager) across three different levels. Of course with knowledge and increasing familiarity of Danielson’s framework, teachers can work with an understanding of the way it frames ‘distinguished’ teaching, aiming for that, but all teachers, no matter their expertise, will have lessons which fall across components and across bands.

Dylan Wiliam's book on my desk; just a few Post-its

Dylan Wiliam’s new book on my desk; just a few Post-its

Imagine my delight (yes, serious nerd delight) when I discovered that Dylan Wiliam’s just-released book Leadership for Teacher Learning spends seven pages (pp.45-51) outlining the research findings around the Danielson Framework. While he cautions that the Framework is limited, especially in its ability to differentiate variation among teachers, he describes it as “rigorously researched” and “the best we can do in relating student progress to classroom observations.” Wiliam cites research on which my school’s decision to use Danielson was based. He points out that it has been shown that students taught by teachers who are rated highly on the Framework make more progress. In fact, students taught by a teacher rated as ‘distinguished’ make almost 30% more progress than those rated as ‘unsatisfactory’.

For my school, the Danielson Framework for Teaching instrument—congruent with our performance review, professional development and coaching processes—helps us to develop a precise and shared language of practice. It isn’t used as a scorecard for external evaluation, something which I strongly advocate against. We instead use it in the following ways.

  • Coaches and managers are trained by a Danielson consultant in generating lesson data and using the Framework in professional conversations (which aligns with out Cognitive Coaching model for coaching conversations).
  • Teachers complete an annual online self-reflection against the Framework, in order to surface reflections about their teaching, help them set goals, and guide their thinking as they plan for the year ahead;
  • During coaching conversations, coaches help teachers to consider their lesson data against the Danielson Framework, looking closely at the descriptors and facilitating reflection against the rubrics.
  • The Danielson Framework sits alongside the Australian National Professional Standards for Teachers as a tool for deepening reflection and conversation about practice, allowing teachers to more specifically envisage, articulate and enact excellence in teaching practice.

This use of the Danielson Framework fits with our philosophical position that everyone is coachable, that all teachers have the will and skill to improve, that coaching should develop internal capacities, and that the coach is always in the service of the coachee.

Embrace mess and imperfection?

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the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, / crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog / and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye– / corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like / a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, / soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays / obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb, / leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures / from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster / fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear, / Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O / my soul, I loved you then! … / A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent / lovely sunflower existence! ~ ‘Sunflower Sutra’, Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Sunflower Sutra’ celebrates beauty in decay. Ginsberg laments the way technology can destroy creativity and crush inner beauty. He reminds us, though, that “we are not our skin of grime”; “we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside.” Ginsberg suggests that if we stay true to ourselves, celebrate our humanity, our uniqueness, our creativity and our connection to the natural world, we can retain our souls and rediscover our glorious selves.

The poem, published in 1956, still resonates today, 60 years on. How many people in our current world feel like they are weighed down by the “grime” of pressure, technology, work, external expectations or life events? How many are influenced by the “soot” of the social media highlight reel, the constant always-on-ness of devices, the weight of online trolls? How many feel they aren’t accepted, let alone celebrated, for their authentic selves? How many make life choices out of freedom rather than fear?

This post has come about because today’s post by Naomi Barnes has me thinking about mess and imperfection, and the ways in which we impose structure on the magnificent chaos of human experience. I agree with Naomi that Twitter is an example of a wonderful, lovable mess. I like her notion of trusting the mess; that messiness is ok, even diffractively productive. It allows meaning to be made and connections to entangle and untangle. Her metaphor of tangled webs of yarn as webs of learning and connection resonates with me. It feels to me like an extension of our blogversation around the web-ness of learning, research and relationships (my webby musings are here, here and here). Naomi has reflected on webs of research as messy. While Pat Thomson talks here about why it can be good to follow intuition and live with mess in research.

I wonder what we dismiss or try to control, which, left alone, might be beautifully imperfect or gloriously creative. Or is it the job of teachers, writers, researchers, artists and scientists to work to make sense of the mess, for themselves and others?

I’ve chosen some of my own images, below, which explore the beauty of the messy or the broken.

Do we look closely enough, at people, situations, places and possibilities, in an effort to appreciate, accept and celebrate them for what they are? Do we see people, not for how we think they can be fixed, improved or developed, but what they offer and how they are their own wonderful selves doing their own authentic things? To what extent do people and organisations feel they need to conform, to organise, to fix or to judge?

Can we trust mess and idiosyncrasy? What happens when we do?

We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread / bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all / beautiful golden sunflowers inside. ~ ‘Sunflower Sutra’, Allen Ginsberg

 

broken or beautiful? rail at Gullfoss

broken or beautiful? rail at Gullfoss

irregular or extraordinary? Pinnacles at dawn

irregular or extraordinary? Pinnacles at dawn

imperfect or interesting? wire at Shark Bay

imperfect or interesting? wire at Shark Bay

misshapen or unique? NY Halloween pumpkin

misshapen or unique? NY Halloween pumpkin

mess or creativity? painting with nature

mess or creativity? painting with nature

Let’s not forget the magic and joy in reading

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Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book alighted, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervour, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with fiery steel. ~ Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

fiction pile on Shell Beach

fiction pile on Shell Beach

I’ve been thinking a lot about reading recently. Learning to read, teaching to read, analysing what we read. And books. In part this is because I am immersed, always, in story. Partly it’s contextual. Recently in Australia, the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute and News Corp have partnered to launch a February ‘Raise a Reader’ campaign to encourage parents to read to their children, in an effort to improve the literacy and vocabulary of students entering school. Additionally, with school going back in Australia this week, there have been click-bait media pieces which paint either parents or teachers as the villains of children’s education. Linda Graham reminds us, though, that we need parent-teacher partnerships, not polarisation.

In this post I attempt to weave together some of my non-linear, multi-layered thoughts on reading and books. It is parents and teachers (and role models and family members and libraries and society) who can help the perceived value of reading and the effective development of literacy. Discussions of literacy, reading and books should be about effective strategies, but also about joy, play and power.

from Dr Seuss' My Many Coloured Days

from Dr Seuss’ My Many Coloured Days

I’ve been surrounded by books my whole life. My family moved a lot, but my childhood homes were linked together by the presence of books. They were sometimes (often?) more plentiful than possessions. I could take unexplored books off any shelf, without having to check the rating or ask permission. As a family, we went to the library, one night a week, when we would each return the previous week’s stack of books and take out a new stack. Science fiction for my mum. Crime fiction for my dad. And whatever books we kids wanted, changing as our tastes changed over time. My grandfather’s study was a wonderland of ancient paper and earthy leather tomes. Books in my childhood were something enjoyable. They were individual escapes but also connected us through the practice of reading, and talking about our reading.

The purpose of Newspeak was … to make all other modes of thought impossible…. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought. ~ 1984, George Orwell

Since I became an English and Literature teacher I’ve spent my work days surrounded by books (now sometimes electronic). I get to read and talk about books for a living. My Year 12 class is currently looking at dystopian texts, some of which explore the power of language to both control and free us. George Orwell’s 1984 explores the idea that minimizing language and vocabulary can diminish and control thought. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 explores a world where books are seen as powerful weapons of knowledge which threaten government control and societal compliance. Yet both novels also show the power of language to free and the power of human thought to prevail. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explores how suppressing books and controlling stories of the past can control the present. Our class has discussed the announcement of the Oxford word of 2015 as an emoji, and whether the distilling of language into pictorial representations is helpful or hindering to communication and thought. We’ve looked at words which exist only in a particular language and wondered whether you need to have a word in order to experience a thought or concept.

Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces. ~ 1984, George Orwell

Part of my Head of English roles at three schools involved leading reading curricula and pedagogy, sometimes from the early years up until the final year of school. David Sousa’s (2014) How the Brain Learns is a good introduction to the world of the alphabetic principle, phonemes, graphemes, encoding, decoding, and the cognitive neuroscience how of learning to read. Sir Jim Rose’s (2006) Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading recommended that the best approach to teaching beginning readers includes discrete, high-quality, multi-sensory, systematic phonics work. It also promoted the use of sharing books, songs and rhyme as ways to develop children’s positive attitudes to literacy. Synthetic phonics is certainly important for children, but so is instilling enjoyment of reading. Always an advocate for balance, in debate and in teaching, I don’t think that phonics and whole language need to be polarised approaches. Systematic phonics instruction explicitly teaches students how to decode and encode language and to be successful readers, but it doesn’t teach them to be readers who value and enjoy reading.

In my high school English classrooms, and in student work, I can tell those students who have devoured books through their childhoods and those who haven’t. In Teaching the Brain to Read (2008), Judy Willis applies brain research to the teaching of reading. She discusses the importance of pleasure and motivation in learning to read, and the role of dopamine in learning. Students need choice, variety, and enjoyment of reading, not only drills and explicit instruction.

my original copy of the Alice Golden Book

my original copy of the Alice Golden Book: rabbit hole reading

When I became a parent, out came my childhood books, including tattered Golden Book volumes. Our shelves at home filled with early readers, picture books, storybooks and favourite novels. As recommended by the recent Australian ‘Raise a Reader’ campaign, we have read to our children since birth. Now 3 and 5 years old, this year in Kindergarten and Pre-Primary, our children are being exposed to the Jolly Phonics program at their local school. They bring home sets of words, in slowly spiralling levels of difficulty, to sound out and learn. They are read to at school and they take books off the shelves of their classroom. They visit the school library with their teachers and the local library with us.

The minimum we read to our kids at home is two books at bedtime. Often we read more than this in a day. This week my eldest started Pre-Primary and on his first visit to the school library he brought home a book which had 223 big pages. Between my husband and I, we read 80 pages the first night. The next two days the first thing our son did when he woke up in the morning was to run and get this book. We finished it tonight, three days after he took it out, and both boys have chosen to sit and listen to every page. This amount of reading wasn’t our choice as parents, but our son’s, so excited was he to read the stories within. He’s hoping we can read the whole thing again before he has to return it.

So as I find myself developing readers at home, being a reader myself, and exploring reading with my students (not to mention academic reading and nerdy reading for my own learning), I find the multi-layeredness of reading too unwieldy to tie down into a simple formula. There are systematic and sensible ways to conceptualise reading; these are, of course, important. And then there are the intangibles: the magic, inhaling the booky perfume (released by the glorious chemical breakdown of lignin and cellulose), the sound and feel of turning pages, and the internal world which comes alive when a book has grabbed you and pulled you deep into its world.

my eldest (then 4yo), reading to our youngest (then 2yo)

my eldest (then 4yo), ‘reading’ to our youngest (then 2yo)

Using coaching in qualitative research interviews

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being interviewed about my research

being interviewed about my research, in front of Sydney Harbour

In my last post, I tried to illuminate some of the internal dialogue and thinking that goes on in the coach’s mind during a coaching conversation. On Twitter, in response to that post, Avril Nicholl reminded me that being deliberate about interaction, and explicit about role, is applicable to qualitative interviewing. So in this post I’ll explain how I used my coaching toolbox when I was conducting qualitative interviews for my PhD.

My PhD experience of the qualitative interview comes from both participant and researcher perspectives. I interviewed one group of participants for my study, as interviewer and researcher. But ethical issues resulted in another group, and me, being interviewed by an independent interviewer. So I was interviewer, designer of protocols and questions for someone else to interview some participants, and an interviewed participant in my research.

Interview is a widely used way of generating data, especially when the researcher is seeking to explore feelings, relationships, beliefs, identities, and insights about people in action in their social worlds. As I discussed here, the creation of meaning is a complex interaction dependent on meaning-maker and context. Narrative researchers often agree that participant stories are not fully formed, waiting to be drawn from the person. Rather, meanings are made on the spot; shaped by the questions asked, the interview structure, the interview environment and the interviewer themselves. Interviews do not just recall knowledge; they produce it, in the moment.

Anecdotally, I experienced this myself in being interviewed for my study by the independent interviewer, who I had briefed on interviewing me and other participants. I had written the questions and the protocols, so I was surprised by the experience of being interviewed for my own study. In thinking aloud, or being probed to think further or differently, my own thinking was not only illuminated, but deepened, extended and re-shaped, even though I knew what the questions and foci beforehand.

The interviews for my PhD sat somewhere between semi-structured and un-structured, designed to elicit storytelling from participants. I wanted to, as narrative research doyenne Catherine Riessman suggests, “follow participants down their diverse trails” (in ‘Analysis of personal narratives’, 2002). I wanted interviews to be less about my agenda (although of course my study had its foci) and more about surfacing participant stories in all their messiness and humanness.

Planned questions were sparing; there were only a few. These were based on the phenomena on which the study focused. Mostly, these anchor questions started with, “Tell me about …” There were also suggestions for probing questions. The interviews were designed to be broadly consistent for each participant (in question order and focus) but the structure of the interview was flexible enough to explore tangents which emerged from each participant’s responses.

When interviewing, I was explicit about my role as researcher and interviewer, especially because I was interviewing people from within my own professional context. I used my coaching toolbox to give me a structure and approach for research interviewing. I applied an interviewer listening pattern of ‘pause, paraphrase, ask question’ (borrowed from Costa & Garmston’s 2006 Cognitive Coaching). This interview structure encouraged participant storytelling, while allowing patterns and idiosyncracies to emerge.

I was aware of leaving space in conversation for pausing and thinking, rather than jumping in when there was silence (as I mentioned in my previous post, restraint and pausing are areas of personal mindfulness for me). My coaching training on eye movement (see visual representation above for more on how to recognise eye cues) allowed me to see what sort of thinking the interviewee was doing, which helped me to wait while that thinking happened; I knew if I jumped in with another question I would be interrupting the person’s internal dialogue or their recollection of an experience. Usually the silence in the interviews didn’t last long but instead was a jumping off point for the participant to speak further; it was a space in which the interviewee was thinking and after which their story would continue.

I found that, rather than asking questions, I was attempting to distil, clarify, or abstract the person’s thinking with a well-considered paraphrase. While the focusing questions were necessary to direct responses onto the research foci, a Cognitive Coaching approach allowed me to ‘get out of the way’ of participants, following them along their own stories as they directed and developed their own responses. After the interviews I had feedback from a number of participants who said that for them the interview was useful, a great conversation, and a luxurious space in which to reflect on their own professional selves and practices. The research interview was valued by participants as an opportunity which provided the space and structure for learning and reflection.

My Cognitive Coaching training also helped to bring to my awareness, during the interviews, to the importance of trust, rapport, body language mirroring, pausing and paraphrasing. Conscious of maintaining rapport, I did not take notes, but allowed a Dictaphone to capture the audio. I watched the conversation body language in a kind of meta out-of-body looking-in-from-outside experience, and often found myself mirroring the interviewee’s body language. I was mindful of how participants used their bodies and hands to express their ideas and their relationships to things. This allowed me to pick up on the nuances of their thinking. Were they sequencing points on their fingers or in the air in a linear pattern? Were they expanding themselves and their ideas out into abstraction or magnitude, or bringing them close to their chests, showing something was dear to them? Non-verbal cues helped me to paraphrase participants’ responses.

For me, coaching and being coached has influenced the way I have conversations in all sorts of arenas. As a parent, as a partner, as a friend, as a teacher and as an interviewer. As a PhD candidate and neophyte researcher, the coach’s toolbox was helpful in developing my approach to qualitative interviews. As interviewer and coach, my PhD interview transcripts and audio provided data for reflection on my practices.

While the role and purpose of a research interviewer is different to the role and purpose of a coach, the principles and skills are transferrable: belief in the capacity of the individual, active listening, paraphrasing, asking questions which mediate thinking, and keeping oneself (coach/interviewer) out of the conversation. Both kinds of conversation – coaching and research interviewing – should be primarily about the person doing the thinking, talking, sharing, storytelling. Although the coach or interviewer of course influences the words and thoughts generated, they should aim to be almost-invisible catalyst, mirror and conduit.

The hard cognitive work of coaching and the curse of expertise

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Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath. ~ Michael Caine

This week I had a chance to reflect on the work of being a coach, work which happens in the throes of a coaching conversation. I was co-presenting part of the Cognitive Coaching course to some colleagues, and as part of the course I modelled a Cognitive Coaching planning conversation in front of the group, with one of the course participants as the coachee.

In my journey to coaching, I’ve often likened the experience of coaching to being a duck, apparently gliding effortlessly across the surface of the coaching conversation pond while the legs paddle manically beneath the surface. This analogy reflects for me my intention of providing for the coachee an experience of effortless rapport. No matter what internal coach dialogue or self-critique is going on inside my head, I want the coachee to feel that I am fully present in the conversation and that the conversation is natural and fluid.

Being fully present in a coaching conversation in which I am coach is hard cognitive work. In that moment I am focusing on maintaining eye contact and watching body language. Are my body language and facial expression open? Is my brow unfurrowed? Am I mirroring the posture and gestures of the coachee? What are their non-verbal cues telling me about their thinking? How can I paraphrase what they are saying in a way that helps their thinking? Do they need me to help boil down the essence of their thinking? Do they need me to help clarify a goal? Bring coherence to a system of ideas? Shift the level of abstraction of their thinking? Challenge them to consider their problem from a different point of view? Apply a different State of Mind (in Cognitive Coaching these are Consciousness, Craftsmanship, Interdependence, Flexibility and Efficacy)?

In a coaching conversation I am also working, in my head, on asking the best questions. Are my questions succinct? Do they reflect the language of the coachee? Do they use those things which my Cognitive Coaching training tells me are best for thinking: open-ended-ness, tentative language, plural forms and positive presuppositions? How is the coachee responding to the words I’m choosing? Have I understood the coachee’s thinking?

During this week’s model coaching conversation I was reminded of Pamela Hinds’ 1999 paper ‘The Curse of Expertise: The Effects of Expertise and Debiasing Methods on Prediction of Novice Performance’ (which I have written about before in terms of doing a PhD). Hinds found that experts may have a cognitive handicap; they are unable to accurately predict the time and difficulty novices need to complete a task. Intermediate learners were more helpful for novices as they still remembered and understood the problems of the beginner.

The curse of expertise suggests that becoming an expert can ‘black box’ the understanding of being a neophyte. Experts seem to forget what it was like not to know something or be able to do something. They have often forgotten the steps, the misconceptions and the struggle to mastery from the novice perspective. I reflected on this as I thought about my performance as the coach in my model conversation. My co-presenter, a Cognitive Coaching trainer with much more expertise than me as a coach and trainer, had taken some data for me during the model conversation. This data was a record of the questions I asked and my pattern of pausing, paraphrasing and questioning. Its purpose was to give me, as the coach, some non-inferential data on which to reflect, in order that I could refine my practice.

As I reflected on my thought processes as coach in the conversation, I found plenty to improve upon. And yet I remember that a few years ago, my post-coaching-conversation reflections were around much simpler and less layered aspects of coaching. Now I am reflecting on more than the conversation maps, the precision of my questioning and paraphrasing. While I still have to focus on those things (and pausing! I have to be very mindful about not jumping in) these aspects have become somewhat automated. I am now able to be thinking also about the Five States of Mind: which State the coachee is focusing on and which I might be able to help them access. I’m able to pay attention to eye movement to tell me about what sort of thinking is happening for the coachee. I’m able to consider how to paraphrase: whether I will clarify thinking or help to shift thinking to another level.

I don’t yet feel like an expert coach but I can see that I’ve moved from novice to intermediate, where some of the basic elements of being a coach in a coaching conversation have been internalised, allowing me to layer nuances of my practice and coach with a more craftspersonlike approach.

Sometimes now it seems my little duck legs are moving in slow motion; I have more control and less mania in my mind while I am coaching. I’m learning that as my skills develop, I stay buoyant more (but not totally!) effortlessly. It’s hard cognitive work, but work which has powerful outcomes for coachee and for the coach themselves. And the liberating thing about the work of coaching, I think, is that the hard work happens in the conversation. It’s in the conversation that the coach needs to be present, focused, and paddling like the dickens. Afterwards — when the coachee’s thinking has been sparked, pushed, pulled, surfaced and mediated through coaching conversation — the coach can reflect on their own practice, but is liberated from taking on the coachee’s thinking, solution finding or working through of problems.

My PhD found that becoming a coach can be a constant state. Just as our identities are in a constant state of becoming (we never arrive but are always being formed and reformed and transformed), coaching can become a way of being and a continual process of growth, self-development and identity work.

Traditional Progressivity or Progressive Traditionalism: Ditch the dichotomy

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Do we need to butt heads? It's not all black & white. Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-white-africa-animals-wilderness-3158/

Do we need to butt heads? It’s not all black & white.
Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-white-africa-animals-wilderness-3158/

I’ve never liked labels and boxes. I remember in high school when another student frustratedly asked me, “What ARE you?” I was bemused that this student was seemingly angered that my varied wardrobe (surfie t-shirts, black jeans, hippie skirts) didn’t fit one high school mould. Similarly, I’ve been a bit perplexed with the ongoing social media flurry around the ‘traditional vs. progressive’ debate, which is often positioned as being an ‘us vs. them’ or ‘right vs. wrong’ dichotomy.

I get uncomfortable when things get dichotomised as I think it increases unproductive antagonism and shuts down nuances and possibilities. Even Star Wars recognises the light in the darkness and the darkness in the light. My sentiments are similar to those of David Rogers who describes himself as a prog-trad continuum slider, and of Stephen Tierney who argues that traditional vs. progressive is a false dichotomy. I agree that traditional and progressive approaches in education aren’t warring factions. We don’t need a hard black line drawn between them. They can co-exist in schools and classrooms, with approaches moving along the continuum depending on teacher, students and the purpose of a lesson. We can attempt balance and compassion in debate and in teaching.

The trad-prog debate is often seen as rooted in ideology. As an educator I am a product of my own childhood, education, previous teachers, teaching experience and life. In order to tease out my perspective on the trad-prog sliding scale, I’ll try here to be transparent about my own beliefs about education, in order to perhaps illuminate the decisions I make about my teaching practice and my perception that we should consider traditional and progressive, rather than traditional or progressive.

I have core beliefs about what teaching should be, including that it is about empowering young people with the knowledge, skills and capacities to be critical (questioning! skeptical! even subversive!) consumers, creators and challengers of knowledge. As an English and Literature teacher I believe in the power of language, and that an ability to decode, interpret and wield language is part of empowering students to be people who can successfully navigate their worlds. I believe that students should learn the literary and artistic canon, the classics, philosophy, history, but also that these are shaped by their contexts (who wrote them? who had power? whose story is told? whose story is absent? who was unable, within that context, to share their [hi]story?). Students also need to navigate popular, multimedia and new media texts and discourses.

I teach English, a compulsory subject, to sometimes reluctant students who are studying English because they have to, not because they enjoy it or see its value. Many students struggle to find success in the English classroom, yet they have to attend. So my approaches to teaching English (as opposed to Literature, where students have chosen to do the course and are often enthusiastic and motivated) are influenced by this. I use Understanding by Design to backward plan curricula, starting with what it is that students need to know and be able to do – KNOWLEDGE. SKILLS. – as well as overarching essential questions.

Students need to be able to read, analyse, critique and develop evidenced arguments. But first they must know the content. The texts. The concepts. What a good argument looks like; what it doesn’t. I use diagnostic tools and pre-testing and rigorous assessment. I instruct, a sage-on-the-stage passionate about the content. I model analysis and argument. I provide exemplars. Texts are chosen for their merit and for their likelihood of being engaging for students. We read texts together and independently. I write. We write. They write. I work with small groups and with individuals to push them to the next phase of knowledge and understanding. I work hard on my questioning technique. I use regular formative assessments to gauge students’ understandings so that I might address pace, or go back or forward a few steps.

Yet I also on occasion – gasp – let students, to some extent, choose their own edventure, personalise their learning and have some autonomy about how they communicate their understanding. I’ve played with genius hour. I’ve negotiated tasks from an adjusted Bloomgard matrix. I use online discussion forums to develop students’ engagement with each other, and with me, around texts and concepts. I use the debate-promoting tool of the ‘human continuum’ in which students choose and defend a position along a classroom wall on a topic (To what extent is Macbeth a villain? To what extent is Frankenstein’s creature a monster?). My creative writing group has a blog in which they add to a collective story. When I’ve taught Romantic poetry, students have spent a lesson channelling their inner Romantic, taking a notebook and pen to a quiet spot around the school to write poetry which embodies Romantic ideals (a task which needs a knowledge of Romanticism and skills to control and manipulate language for effect). My creative writing lessons at the river and the cafe strip aren’t going to win any awards for knowledge-transmission. I don’t set up my desks in rows like isolated islands, but incorporate comfort and flexibility into learning spaces. I don’t see my students as vessels to be filled with knowledge. I expect students to do the work set, but I encourage them to intelligently question and challenge rather than mindlessly comply.

The thing is, I want my students to know that English is entrenched in life and ideas and society. Language is about knowledge and rules, and knowing when you’re accepting the knowledge and rules, and when you might challenge them. It can be about fun and satire and aesthetics and critique and expression and enjoyment. It can challenge the status quo or celebrate the way things are. It’s not black and white; knowledge or process; fun or seriousness; acceptance or opposition. This isn’t about my whims as the teacher or an ideal of free thinking do-what-you-like-preneurship. It’s about making deliberate practitioner decisions based on a knowledge of students, context, teaching, learning and the classroom, without feeling the need to conform to an extreme or singular view.

Students need knowledge. Students need skills. In English, they need to know and remember and synthesise and read and write and speak and listen and question and argue and persuade and create. They also need to play, experiment and develop their capacities for engaging thoughtfully, reflectively and critically with texts, ideas and … people.

Classrooms are more than effect sizes. They involve a combination of knowing and doing and feeling and being and learning and listening and thinking and wondering and working. Trust and vulnerability and relationships and identity formation. Let’s not reduce all that to a dichotomy of good vs. evil in education.