Providing High Quality Online Feedback to Support K-12 Teachers Instructional Improvement Through Principled Adaption

Daniel Rees Lewis

The goal of this study is to build approaches and theories for providing teachers online feedback as they redesign their curriculum to be more effective and equitable. I will conduct a design-based research-practice partnership (Penuel & Gallagher, 2017) with an equity-focused K-12 professional learning network with teachers across California. Within the network, teachers redesign their existing curriculum to be more effective and equitable by following a principled adaptation process (e.g. Debarger et al., 2017). Principled adaptation can support more effective and equitable teaching (e.g. Gallagher et al., 2011) when teachers receive significant expert feedback in highly resourced face-to-face settings. To support more teachers in the principled adaptation process, we might provide online feedback through professional learning networks�distributed networks for improving teaching, supported by technology. However, we do not have robust theories about how to elicit high-quality feedback online for teachers conducting principled adaptation. I propose to address this gap by creating an empirically grounded local instructional theory that defines the pedagogical and technological approaches to do so within a professional learning network. Providing regular high-quality feedback to teachers as they work to improve their curriculum and practice can help address critical issues of equity and effectiveness in education.

About Daniel Rees Lewis

Daniel Rees Lewis is a postdoctoral fellow in the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences in 2018 from Northwestern University?s School of Education and Social Policy. In his research, he creates and studies pedagogies, technologies, and organizations to promote more effective teaching and learning of real-world design. For example, his projects have focused on how to support university students designing for the homeless population, or, as in this project, how teachers can design more effective and equitable curricula. In his work, he draws from and contributes to the Learning Sciences, Computer-supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), Design Theory, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). His current projects include examining how to help design teams learn to work with stakeholders to discover and meet their needs; creating technology to provide more effective stakeholder and peer feedback; examining the nature of coaching in design and how to create technology for coaching; and defining design-based research methods to help researchers be more responsive to stakeholder needs.