How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

evidence 131
4. Mastery learning: not of interest to practitioners; of interest
mostly to the researchers.
5. Pedagogical theory versus practice: anticipated big, turned out
to be little at the sites.
6. Teacher socialization: increasingly a major reason for demise of
the NSF-sponsored reform curriculum.
7. Elitist teaching: more attention to the able students, a stinging
question; it was present but remained hidden; it was not of concern
to most professionals in the field.
The list continued to be refined. Most of the original issues persisted,
some faded, some new ones emerged.
The next May, I circulated an “early outline” of final chapter titles.
Team member Terry Denny chided me for still seeing what I saw at the
beginning, calling it “regressive focusing.” Even after a year in the field,
the picture was hazy. It was difficult to find a dominant structure of
issues across sites. It was easy to argue that the issues identified for organizing
the final report were, in fact, important findings at only half our
sites. Our team could have included several other story lines. And other
teams of researchers might have found the same data to tell of issues we
missed.
It became increasingly apparent that, particularly with naturalistic
studies, we are working through a merger of a research viewpoint (your
viewpoint) and the activity in the field. There is a uniqueness to the way
the researcher or re`search team sees things and a uniqueness to the sites.
There are alternative stories to be told, even amid hopes for strong generalizations.
We find that some audiences want researchers to bend every
effort to present a report the same as other researchers would present, to
tell the story that best represents the activity at the sites. But most audiences
recognize the need for interpretation, personal insights. In the end,
pretty much, we tell the story that seems most meaningful to ourselves.
The choice of “most meaningful” is subjective. We have numerous
opportunities to check out views and patches with other researchers,
with representatives of our audiences, with program staffs and others.
Valuable as those negotiations are, particularly for correcting erroneous
or offensive inclusions, they are weak grounds for progressive focusing.
We rely greatly on intuition.
Progressive focusing is a slogan, a good slogan. It indicates our desire
to keep observations and interpretations unfinished. But we sacrifice the