Researcher's Chair

We had our first "researcher's chair" today, and we learned some things that we're going to start applying right away. The idea behind this activity is that each of us will get the chance to talk about our research project and get some feedback from the rest of the group. The first thing we learned is that we need more time--originally we (that's the royal "we"--actually it was Cindy and Jason) scheduled 1/2 hour for each researcher's chair, but after 1/2 hour today we all felt as though we had just scratched the surface with Rebecca's research, so we're planning to spend another half hour tomorrow. The plan now is to give each of us two half-hour blocks of time so that we can discuss our projects, take a night to reflect, and then come back and finish our discussion.

The other thing we learned is that it would be helpful to front-load the activity a bit more. Jason suggested that we write up a quick summary of what we've done so far so that we don't have to use too much time explaining our project at the beginning, and then to write down three questions to help focus our discussion and make sure it's as productive as possible.

I have the researcher's chair tomorrow, so on my blog I've written a summary of what I've done so far with my research project, which I decided was a useful activity in itself. It helped me to focus in a systematic way on what I've already done and what I still need to do, which is crucial for us "concrete-sequential" thinkers.

The questions that I hope we can address tomorrow are the following:

1. What things don't you understand about my project? I'm so close to it that I know I make a lot of assumptions about what others know and understand. The pre-institute blogging has helped me a lot to identify some of them, but I know there are many more. So what is it that is still not clear about what I'm doing and how I'm doing it?

2. What are the things that are troublesome about my project? If you were reading an article about this project, what would be frustrating about it? What things would you be rolling your eyes at, what issues would you be wondering why I'm not addressing, or what concepts or ideas would you be wishing that I would acknowledge?

3. What are the most interesting or intriguing aspects of my research project? What are the things that you think I should pursue further and explore more?

Looking at this list I'm sort of amused at the fact that these are pretty similar to the "stars and wishes" that we do at CSUWP for author's chair. That's interesting, I think, but I honestly didn't start out with that in mind.


TTFN CSUWPAI!

Just kidding everyone, txt tlk is annoying, but I couldn't resist using such an impressive string of acronyms!

(BTW, TTFN means "Ta Ta for Now." Oh, and BTW means "By the Way." ;-)

LOL