Training the Trainers Program Improvement - Research Paper Example

? STRAYER EDU: 515 ASSIGNMENT #2: PROGRAM IMPROVEMENT PREPARED BY: CHIMA OKORO FOR: DR. GEORGE FRUNZI SUBMITTED BY: AUGUST 2ND Program Improvement This paper is a discussion of how the program ‘Training the Trainers’ that I proposed in the previous assignment could be improved. In this program, we will train all the professionals involved in education on how to undertake education research effectively. We can use several means to improve this program from its proposed state. According to Magyar (2010), improving a program increases its usefulness, value, implementation ease, quality, and impact. Therefore, by improving the program, we would be expecting to have a program that is more useful, of higher quality and easier to implement. As a result, we would be increasing the capability of the program to achieve its key objective and goal of ensuring that all education professionals become effective in research undertaking and management. The ‘training the trainers’ program, as earlier proposed, could either use coordinated multidisciplinary units or adapt integrated, interdisciplinary units. However, the effects of these types of units would be different when applied in the program. In our case, the ones that would best serve the needs of the program are the integrated, interdisciplinary units. According to Swango and Steward (2002), an integrated, interdisciplinary unit incorporates the entire core subjects learners need to learn. In this kind of units, an educator administers to learners concepts tailored towards different disciplines. These kinds of units would revolve around different subjects and, thus, they would be involving different concepts that can be applied by all the learners regardless of their field of expertise. There are various reasons that make integrated, interdisciplinary units to serve the needs of this program better than the other types of units. One of the reasons is that this type of units brings an interconnection between different subject areas (Mohnsen, 2008). Therefore, by using this kind of units the program team would be able to integrate different subject areas for easier administering of the program. With this type of units, it is also possible to teach applicability of a concept in different field of education. This would make all the learners involved in the program gain equally regardless of their area of specialization. Moreover, we can teach several interdisciplinary concepts within a unit. This saves both time and resources while still achieving the required goals and objectives. Therefore using this kind of units in the program would make the process of implementation much easier. However, integrated, interdisciplinary units also have some disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is that in this kind of units, the concepts taught are unified. This makes it difficult for the learners to distinguish concepts that belong to a specific discipline. Another disadvantage is that in this type of units, learners are taught some concepts that do not fit their area of specialization. Such concepts might not be useful in their professional undertaking hence learning those concepts make no difference in their career. As the program team, we thought that it is better to give people additional information instead of giving them inadequate information. This is why we decided to use this type of units despite knowing these two disadvantages of this type of units. A very good example is a unit designed to teach how to design an educational research. Such kind of unit could include several concepts some of them designing a survey, designing an experiment and designing a psychometric research integrated in one unit. It could also include the moments of how to design a research in different disciplines of education like science education, language education or social sciences education. The unit would integrate different concepts, as well as explain their various applications in different disciplines. As a result, the unit would have a greater capability of making the learners to have a better understanding of education research. Therefore, the program would have a higher chance of achieving its objectives. However, in the same unit, a teacher who has specialized in science education will be taught on how to design a research on language education. Such kind of knowledge might not directly help him. However, this knowledge will also be important since education disciplines are interconnected. Moreover, education professionals can become researchers that are more effective when they work in interdisciplinary teams. Working in interdisciplinary teams requires knowledge of how things are done in other disciplines hence giving this kind of knowledge to education professionals would be paramount. Another improvement that we can do on this program is adapting a conceptual lens. A conceptual lens explains complex events through reducing their complexity to some sense making dimensions (Hargens, 2010). To adapt a conceptual lens in a way that heightens integration, we need to create an exercise. In our case, the exercise that we would use to achieve this is having learners design some small research on their respective fields of specialization. In this kind of exercise, the learners would be required to come up with a research design for use in researching a certain aspect of students. They would also be required to implement the research designs they have designed. In this exercise, they will need to apply the knowledge they would have acquired during the program implementation. Moreover, they will need to use knowledge acquired for their experience as educators. The educators involved in this program are from different backgrounds. Therefore, we expect them to have different learning abilities and experiences. The exercise we have designed would try to reveal this diversity during the program implementation. Understanding the diversity of learners involved in this program would be very crucial in the process of implementation. For the exercise to achieve its objective, it will need to be simple and interesting. That is why the learners are allowed to choose a specific area of educational research to handle in the exercise. Since they have the priority of choosing, it is expected that they would choose the area that they feel they are most comfortable with. The conceptual lens in this exercise would enhance the successfulness of the program. According to Ubbes (2008), a conceptual lens moves a topic from a lower cognitive level to a more understandable level. Therefore, if adapted for this program it would help in moving the topics taught from their cognitive levels to their factual levels. The reason for this is they address a topic from its applicability perspective unlike the other instructional approach that uses a theoretical approach. This would promote understanding of the topics taught among the learners. Moreover, such an approach also helps in integrating concepts taught in a topic with others from another topic. This reveal the interconnectivity between the topics taught in the program. In this way, a conceptual lens heightens the program integration and thus promotes program coherence. Groups of at least three learners will undertake the exercise. This is because of the advantages that come with group work in comparison with individual’s work. If it would be undertaken by individuals, there would be no information sharing. Information sharing is a learning process that can be very significant especially for complex concepts. Lack of information sharing would limit the learning process undertaken using the exercise. However, when undertaken by a group, learners within that group can share their ideas and experiences in their effort to come up with a good research design. This would provide some sort of teamwork in the exercise undertaking thus increasing the outcome of applying a conceptual lens in heightening the integration of the program. The other improvement that we can do on our program is using of both the integrated concept-process model and school-to-work integration. An integrated concept-process model can be used in several ways to improve the program. One of the ways is by using it to enhance understanding of the concepts taught in the program. According to Erickson (2002), this kind of model when adapted it reinforces the academic and occupational learning among the learners. This is because it would try to connect concepts learned to their applicability in educational research. Therefore, using this kind of model would promote conceptual understanding among learners hence the program would become more successful. Moreover, use of this model promotes understanding of occupational applicability of concepts. When used in learning it ensures that the learners not only understand the concepts better, but also understand how to apply the concepts in their specific areas of specialization. Since the aim of this program is to make educational professionals become proficient researchers, then this model is very appropriate for this particular case. However, if it is not well used it can result to program incoherence. Therefore, it has to be well utilized to make the program effective in providing research knowledge to educators while not violating program coherence. Another way in which this model would enhance understanding of the concepts taught in the program is through giving the study a greater meaning among the learners. According to Erickson (2002, p. 111), “this kind of model uses integrated concepts drawn from academic disciplines and occupational areas to focus and align interdisciplinary work.” This would give learners a better understanding of the concepts and their better applicability. Therefore, the program would have a greater meaning to the educators involved and they would be motivated to dedicate both their time and resources to the activities involved in the program implementation. The dedication of time and resources would greatly improve the program and make the work of its implementation far much easier. As a result, the program would have much higher capability of achieving its objectives. Use of school-to-work integration is another approach that improves the program proposed. This could be used in several ways to improve the program. One of the ways is by improving the learning experience of the learners involved in the program. Stull & Sanders (2003), reveal that there is an indication that if the instructor uses a school-to-work integration the students would gain a better learning experience. This is because this kind of approach involves practical on-job learning activities. Although these activities sometimes might be difficult, learners are always motivated by the gains they obtain from the process. Work experience or payments are the major gains obtained from a school-to-work program. This results to an improved learning experience that could enhance conceptual understanding of the program. As a result, the program achieves its goals and thus we can conclude that the program would have become far much better. The other way in which school-to-work integration can improve this program is by enabling learners to get involved in diversified activities related to particular concepts. In our case, the learners could be involved in designing questionnaires for education research, collecting education data, analyzing the education data collected, or interpreting the analysis results. Moreover, it would also enable learners to get involved in a diversified education research like state level or community-level education research. The diversification of both activities and research types would promote conceptual understanding of topics addressed by the proposed program. Therefore, the program would become more successful in terms of achievement of the required goals and objectives. If school-to-work learning approach were used in program implementation, the involved learners would be able to practice the concepts taught under supervision. The supervisors involved in this kind of approach are always people who have great knowledge in the field as well as experience. Therefore, they are very effective in guiding the learners on how to develop skills and how to utilize the skills developed. Moreover, these supervisors can act as mentors to the learners. In this way, they would help them identify the places where they might be going wrong and where they need to improve. With this approach, improvement of learners from time to time is guaranteed hence the program would have been greatly improved. We could achieve another improvement on the program by creating concept-process integrated units. Making such units is a difficult task and thus I will need to make maximum utilization of lessons learned from my teachers. In my academic life, I have had a privilege of learning several lessons that can assist me in different ways to create a concept-process integrated unit. One of the lessons learned from my instructors is that such-like unit must include student engagement. Students could not be engaged in an activity that is not interesting. Therefore, this lesson indicated that a concept-process integrated unit should involve only the activities that are interesting to the learners. However, several ways exist for making an activity to be interesting to learners. The most popular ones are, use of incentive and use of in-class games. I would apply this lesson in several ways to make my concept-process integrated unit. One of the ways in which I would use this lesson is in the process of selecting activities that are interesting for the unit I would create. However, it is difficult to identify activities that would motivate the all the learners to improve their participation. Moreover, it is difficult to identify activities that would motivate all the learners involved in the project. The above lesson learned from my teachers would be helping me to make adjustments in the activities chosen for the unit to make the unit more interesting. This would increase learners’ participation and thus improve the quality of concept-process integrated unit that I would have created. Another lesson that I learned from my instructors that would assist me in creating a process-integrated unit is the knowledge that such unit must involve occupation-based activities. For example if I am to create an integrated unit concerning survey undertaking, the unit must contain activities like questionnaire designing and collecting data from other learners. Learners involved in the project should undertake such activities practically. Incorporating such-like activities would make the concept-process integrated unit created to become more understandable. It would also assist in integrating the unit to its real-life applicability and thus make it to be effective in the process of program implementation. Moreover, I learned various criteria used to select activities to include in a unit. I learned that the selected activities should be simple and understandable to the learners. For example, it is illogical to select an activity that is too difficult to represent a concept while we can use a simpler activity to represent the same concept. Putting such an activity in a unit would make an instructor spend more time teaching a certain unit than require and thus the unit would not maximally utilize the time it is allocated. In addition, the activity chosen should relate with the concept or topic addressed by the unit. This means that we cannot just select any type of activity for the units in this project. The reason for this is that if inappropriate activities are chosen, then the program would become incoherent and thus it would be difficult to implement. By making use of the lessons learned from my instructors to enhance learners’ engagement and to incorporate practical activities in a unit I would be making the units created to be more effective. However, as I also learned from my instructors the practical activities and learners engagement strategies should be well coordinated to achieve effective units. If there is no coordination in this kind of activities, then the activities will not be coherent and as a result, the units we would have created would have poor integration. From the lessons learned, I can say that the best way to create a concept-process integrated unit is by creating practical activities, coordinating the activities, and promoting students participation. In conclusion, I have identified several ways that we could use to improve the program I had proposed. One of these ways is using integrated, interdisciplinary units. As compared to the coordinated, multidisciplinary units, the integrated, interdisciplinary units are more appropriate for this specific situation. Another way is by creating an exercise to utilize conceptual lens to heighten integration. The use of integrated concept-process model and school-to-work integration, as well as creating concept-process integrated units for the program could improve the program. However, these are not the only ways that we could use to improve the program and therefore I would propose that further research. In such a research, the researchers could identify more ways that the program team can use to make the program more efficient before implementing it. References Erickson, H. L. (2002). Concept-based curriculum and instruction: Teaching beyond the facts. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Hargens, S. E. (2010). Integral theory in action: Applied, theoretical and constructive perspective on the Aqal model. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Magyar, C. I. (2010). Developing and evaluating education programs for students with autism. New York, NY: Springer. Mohnsen, B. S. (2008). Teaching middle school physical education: A standard-based approach for grade 5-8. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Stull, W. J., & Sanders, N. M. (2003). The school-to-work movement: Origin and destinations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Swango, C. J., & Steward, S. B. (2002). Help! I’m teaching middle school science. Danvers, MA: NSTA Press. Ubbes, V. A. (2008). Educating for health: An inquiry-based approach to pre-K-8 pedagogy. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetic. Read More