Blog #11: Information Behavior in Professional Contexts

For my research project, I am looking at the information seeking behaviors of teachers.  Case categorizes school teachers as practitioners under the umbrella of social scientists and claims they make "little use of research findings" (p. 295).  From my experience, unfortunately, this is very true.

Outside of coursework for master's degrees, most practicing teachers seem to spend very little time looking at research in education or their subject area journals and even less time contributing to them.  There are exceptions, of course: I adapted one of my most successful and long-standing lessons from an article that I just happened to see in the English Journal.  Certainly it's not for lack of interest, but like most things, the barrier is time.  Between lesson planning, delivering, and assessing; clerical work; communicating with parents; dealing with special cases; monitoring the hallway, playground, and lunchroom, etc., etc.; teachers simply do not have much extra time to devote to reading or conducting real research.  And since there is no financial advantage or professional expectation to do so, it falls to a very low priority task.

There is a clear and large divide between theoretical research and practice in education. So, how then do practicing teachers find out what they need to know? Personal learning communities provide the bulk of the information. Teacher-written websites, teacher-created district curriculum guides, and grade level or subject area PLC meetings can help teachers with lesson plans, teaching strategies, and rubrics. Taking time off to attend statewide or national conferences can also help spark new ideas.  Mostly, though, teachers have to rely on day-to-day creative planning, monitoring and adjusting in the classroom, and a healthy dose of self-reflection to develop a sound practice.

In terms of my progress this week, a couple more teachers completed my survey and I ended up with 21 responses, almost 50%.  I have created graphs and tables based on the quantitative responses via Google Forms, but have not yet officially started coding the longer essay responses.