0.2 Holoman, h., & Yates, p. (february 2009). mining best practice  (Page 3/8)

Community engagement: professor level

The collaborative projects quickly commenced among various groups of faculty members and local agencies/institutions within the county. As two faculty members from the College of Education, we teamed with the local school system in hopes of conducting a valid and useful research study for all of its stakeholders. The first step of our collaborative project consisted of an initial meeting with the superintendent and his administrative team. Without any prior discussion with school personnel and an anecdotal review of system-wide student achievement data, we arrived for the meeting equipped with a complete outline of a possible research study. Yes, we were prepared, however, it did not take us long to discover that this approach was not the proper design for a collaborative project.

After much discussion about the needs of the school system, we humbly acknowledged our presumptiveness and abandoned our predetermined “well written” proposal. Instead, we pledged to meet with individual school principals to design a collaborative and valuable, “on-site”, “school-specific” research study—and ensured all administrators that the project would not interfere with instructional time. The researchers quickly discovered that an effective community engagement project meant walking alongside your partners, talking with them about their needs, and designing a project together that would enhance their community and its people (i.e. principals, teachers, students, and parents).

A collaborative research study--uncovering the best practice language in a rural school system

While conducting the individual meetings with principals, a Best Practice Language (BPL) research study evolved. The BPL research study would involve every teacher within the school system, thus giving a voice to each of them. Throughout the next year, the researchers visited the county weekly to design and implement the research study components. The project included visits to principals, communication with the superintendent and assistant superintendent, the polling of teachers, interviewing local experts and sharing the results of the study with every teacher and administrator at each school. In order to accomplish all the steps of the research study a BPL Acquisition Model was designed by the researchers and implemented within the five schools in the county school system. The following section provides a detailed outline of the BPL Acquisition Model.

Bpl acquisition model

Step one

Major Issues Poll (MIP)--We asked teachers from each school to identify three to five major issues that were impacting teaching and learning at their school. The researchers gathered this information by using a MIP.

Step two

Local Expert Poll (LEP)—After tabulating the MIP information and identifying the major issues at each school, a LEP was conducted. The LEP asked all faculty members from each school to list the names of people on their faculty who were considered to be resident experts in dealing with the major issues identified.