EduBlog Insights

Meridian Middle School computer Technologies Journal in its current issue asks this question:

Do the teaching-centered blogs of middle grades educators support
reflective practice? That’s the research question examined in this article, Reflection and the Middle School Blogger: Do Blogs Support Reflective Practices?

They examined 12 randomly selected blogs from a pool of 38 teacher-created, teaching-centered blogs. The goal was to determine whether they were useful reflective devices for practicing middle school teachers.

This is interesting to follow how they did this study. They developed a rubric to assess the quantity and quality of reflection displayed in each subject’s writing sample. Examples are included.
I don’t have enough background in this area to really know what I think yet but I plan to study it some more. I’ve only done a quick read but it appears to go in depth about the process. It should give us all “food for thought.”

The last paragraphs states:

The results of this study give insight into the efficacy of blogs when used by middle school educators. These results demonstrate the potential usefulness of blogs in promoting reflective practice with practicing teachers. However, results do not demonstrate that blogs are being utilized effectively for reflective purposes. This conclusion suggests multiple avenues for future research. For example, research examining exemplary middle school teacher bloggers who do engage in frequent and deep reflection would be useful. Understanding the process in which these bloggers employ and why they use their blogs to support reflective practice would be illuminating. Research to support Bolton ’s (1999) contention that reflective teaching practitioners are leaders and trendsetters would be beneficial as well. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 6:44 pm and is filed under About Weblogs, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.