EDUCOLAND AS AN EXAMPLE OF LINKING EDUCATIONAL THEORY
CPD for teachers throughout their careers. It was recommended that all teachers should have ample opportunity to improve and update their knowledge, skills and competences (EU, 2008).
A serious problem of teacher professional preparation and all CPD is the gap between educational theory and school practice (Korthagen et al., 2001). The attempts to bridge the gap fail. At the same time there is unnecessary loss due to ineffective mutual communication between theory and practice. Practising teachers are often forced to deal with new unexpected problems intuitively without scientific knowledge. Experts on education look for and provide science-based solutions to many problems but they must be verified in practice. This could lead (and leads) to the situation where educational methods innovated by teachers and experts do not meet the current needs of the young generation (especially the NET-generation). The research sector is often not aware of the current needs of school practice and therefore deals with theoretical and often outdated research. At the same time valuable good-quality findings of experts do not get into teachers´ practice in time, although they are necessary. We tried to improve this bad situation within our research with the support of the project EDUCOLAND.
3. Research questions and methods
The aim of our research is the attempt to bridge the gap between educational theory and practice.
We assigned a research task to link school practice with research environment. We conducted wide-ranging research. We found a set of interconnected partial research problems and corresponding research questions, which include:
How to motivate practising teachers to be interested in research outcomes and to apply them in practice?
How to motivate experts on education to choose current issues from practice and to verify their effectiveness in practice?
How to create communication channels for linking theory and practice between practising teachers and experts on education at universities?
New research problems should result in new research methods. A new research method that connects experts and teachers and therefore theory and practice has appeared. This research method is called design-based research and was founded by Reeves (2006). DBR with its developmental objectives and action-based goals differs from other types of research. The main advantage of DBR is its close systematic coherence with practical applications. The basic principle of DBR is the close cooperation of experts and teachers, which is a prerequisite for proper selection of research problems and subsequent validation and application of research outcomes in practice (Vanan den Akker et al., 2006). Precisely for this reason, we used DBR for solving our problem of linking theory and practice.
4. Research results and discussion
Our research was supported by the project Education for Competitiveness Operational Programme (ECOP). This project is based on linking university research (in our case, the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University) with teachers at schools (primary and lower secondary schools) in the region of South Moravia. The core solution of the project was the close connection between selected teachers of different subjects at schools and experts on subject education at universities. These teachers carried out diagnostics of teachers’ professional needs and the requirements were passed to the experts at universities. The experts created programmes, modules, e-learning courses, study texts, learning aids etc.
that were passed back to the teachers through a web portal. The materials were used primarily in teacher training and also for subsequent practical use in class.
The main means of communication is an interactive web portal EDUCOLAND managed by the university. Work outcomes of teacher candidates (often linked to practice) were also transmitted into practice. The university is the guarantor of quality and proficiency and sustainability of the project in the future. The main objective of the project was to create systemic CPD for teachers and other teaching staff throughout the complex spectrum of their professional needs with emphasis on:
innovation of teaching/learning methods
collecting and disseminating good examples from practice
arranging international cooperation
ICT use
training techniques of developing students' literacy (scientific, technical, linguistic, ICT, financial, environmental etc.).
The current focus is kept on positive elements of the educational reform implemented in the Czech Republic. We would like to present a part of our research outcomes in this study that looked for a communication channel between theory and practice. The means of communication is the web portal EDUCOLAND (2014) which is presented briefly here. The homepage of the web portal EDUCOLAND (Figure 1) contains a number of components and the most important are the folders of individual subjects (left bar). There is a green arrow labelled Physics as an example.
Figure 1. Homepage of portal EDUCOLAND
After selecting the appropriate subject folder, the structure of other subfolders appears (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Breakdown of PHYSICS folder PHYSICS
News from the field of physics
New educational methods
Exchange of experience
School experiments
E-learning courses
FAQ
Archives
An example of the material from the folder "School experiments" we are presenting (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Example of material School experiments
In this folder with a physical experiment the teacher finds instructions on how to carry out the experiment: educational objective, list of instruments and materials, description of realization of the experiment, organisation of the experiment, photo of the experiment, video clip with the experiment, teacher guide of the implementation of the experiment into instruction etc.
Within our design-based research, aimed at bridging the gap between educational theory and practice, we came across the question of choice of educational contents – the curriculum, i.e. what the new NET generation of students should be taught. Our research has come to the conclusion that educational contents should be transformed and the main selection criteria for new contents should be in particular:
(1) Up-to-date educational goals: they now focus on interdisciplinarity and application of knowledge in future careers and in real life
(2) Compatibility with teaching methods: contents should be adequate for innovated educational methods (e.g. IBSE - Inquiry Based Science Education)
(3) Reduction and updates: focus on key concepts and core issues, bringing science education containing redundant theoretical knowledge closer to everyday life
In our research we also asked for the opinions of teachers and experts on subject education with regard to their cooperation in project implementation using the portal EDUCOLAND (20014). The research method was a structured interview. We present the most common opinions of teachers and experts:
Teachers' opinions:
cooperation with experts contributed to the increase of proficiency: "I got some news from my field"; "I learned new methods"
communication with experts led to the application of theoretical knowledge in practice: “I´m trying new methods - it helped me to understand some pedagogical theories - I realized why it is necessary to change the approach to students”
increased confidence thanks to cooperation with experts; willingness to participate in research:
"I am interested in participating in research," I will not reject questionnaires, etc.., I know it can help "
understanding the importance of theoretical knowledge: "In the past I wanted completely practical things, I did not want to know anything about how to use them and why - today I understand the importance of theoretical knowledge"
Opinions of experts on subject education:
clear presentation of research outcomes: "what should be used is "comprehensible" language for teachers"
choice of practical research goals: "I must be interested more in practical issues, what to write about, issues that are most important for teachers"
emphasis on linking theory and practice: "in addition to basic research, it is necessary to implement applied research, I found out that I was detached from reality - I do not know what is going on at schools today"
new different perspective on teachers: "mutual cooperation with teachers in research is possible and beneficial"
Based on interviews with teachers and experts on subject education, we can conclude that mutual cooperation was beneficial for both groups. The vast majority of teachers reported that before this project they had not studied either the results of educational research or any professional educational publications, mostly because they did not understand them and considered them unnecessary. They had never thought of implementing research in class by themselves and testing the effect of methods on students etc. They usually changed methods intuitively. Experts on subject education realized that if their research results were to be used by teachers in practice, they should use comprehensible language. We found out that in an appropriate environment both groups cooperated very actively.
5. Conclusions and implications
We tried to resolve the educational problem of the gap between theory and practice. This gap arises because practising teachers at schools and experts at universities differ in their views on education.
We did not look for reasons for the emergence of this gap, but ways of overcoming it. We used the method of design-based research, which is inherently close to the link between research and practice and connects experts on education and teachers. We developed a communication tool between theory and practice, which is the web portal EDUCOLAND connecting teachers in the region with its research department at university. Our ambition in the future is to look for common areas where theory and practice can meet in common solutions of educational problems. A current challenge is to create a functional system of CPD, retraining professionals who decide to enter the teaching profession.
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