Introduction-1

For some time now I have planned a teacher research project focused on an assignment I require of seniors majoring in communication disorders and enrolled in CD 427 (Therapeutic Procedures II). I teach this undergraduate capstone course each spring with an emphasis on the following units of study: counseling, ethics, and treatment methodologies for disorders of language and fluency. This particular assignments serves as the assessment for what students have learned in their study counseling in clinical practice. The product, or tangible outcome, of this assignment is a research paper that comes from analysis and synthesis of numerous pieces of data collected throughout the counseling unit of study.

The assignment involves several stages and layers and centers around a role-playing exercise where each student has the opportunity to function in the role of a speech - language pathologist. The specific steps in this assignment, as specified in the written instructions provided to each student at the beginning of this unit of study included:

1. Students received a written explanation of what personna they were to adopt during the role playing and some background information providing insight into the reason for the "meeting" between a speech language pathologist and the parent of a child with a communication disorder. In some cases, students were assigned roles as speech-language pathologists (e.g., Pam-SLP or Doug-SLP) and in others they adopted the role of a parent (e.g., Mrs. North or Dr. Davis). Each student would use their experience as a speech language pathologist as the basis for their analysis.
2. After studying their roles, students completed a two page writing (referred to as pre-writing) enabling them to step into the shoes of the character they were to become. Those students playing the role of parent submitted a copy of pre-writing to the instructor of the course who distributed these documents to the appropriate speech language pathogist.
3. On the assigned day, students met in a MOO (a text-based virtual reality environment that enables people to adopt a personae and to interact synchronously with other indivduals connected to the same computer server from remote locations). During the role-playing, transcripts of each session were made and subsequently mailed to the class mailing list.
4. Following the role-playing experience students once again wrote two pages, in their character's voice, as a way to articulate their responses and reactions to the interaction that had just taken place. This completed the corpus of data to be examined in this study.
5. Using the five pieces of data (two pre-writings - one from each individual, two post-writings - one from each individual participating in the role playing.
6. Finally, students explored and read and studied their documents, looking for 2-3 major themes arising out of the role playing simulation.
7. Students, in their classroom small groups meet with me to talk about their work. How well are they progressing? What themes have they identified?
8. Once submitted, papers undergo a peer review process. This year, we modeled the behaviors of a functional peer response group. Students then received feedback from their peers about their work and feedback from me about their work. This feedback guided their revision work before they submitted the final draft of the assignment.

Initially, I believed my interest and intent was to describe and provide a model of a novel way to use a particular computer technology to support learning. Over the years, most of my students have created and submitted acceptable projects that serve primarily to affirm what they already know and understand. Each year, however, I have received two or three astonishing projects; work that evidenced deep and profound transformations in the students creating those projects. On June 14, 2002, I wrote in my online journal that I wanted to observe and think about the processes the transformed students engaged in and attempt to “find patterns in the processes to make them explicit instead of invisible or hidden to the particular thinker.” I needed to know and understand how the transformed students negotiated and navigated the various stages of this project. This knowledge, I hoped, would provide me with a better understanding of how to facilitate transformation for more of my students. I decided to begin by explicating the processes utilized by one transformed student.

In the spring of 2002, Kelly was one of the students who produced astonishing work on this assignment. In her final semester of her undergraduate career, Kelly (and all the other students in the class) had been in three of my other courses. She had shown herself to be bright, responsive, responsible, hardworking, and eager to learn and please. With a grade point average of 3.86 she had already ordered her magna cum laude honor cords for graduation by the time she began this assignment.

Things I Need To Know About Kelly

Hometown and high school Family’s educational background Minor (interdisciplinary?)