A Teacher Exploring His Perceptions of His Class

This example shows an Enquire Within session in which an experienced teacher reflects on his class. It is included because it shows the ‘story’ of a session, including the introspections and comments which the teacher made as he was doing the session. It’s important to remember that using Enquire Within is in fact no more than a means of having a highly structured conversation with oneself, and that the process of doing a session is equally, or sometimes more, important than the final Grid. At the risk of being repetitive, it is included to make the point that sometimes the journey matters at least as much as the arrival.

The teacher is a Deputy Head who has a class of 9-10 year olds in a large city. The example shows the progress of the session through the dialog boxes, accompanied by two kinds of commentary. Commentary in ordinary type is ours, explaining what the program is doing. Commentary in italics is what the teacher was saying as we went through the session - in other words, the insights it provoked in him.

The overall purpose for the session was ‘to help me learn more about my ability to control a class’.

NOTE: Screen shots on this page relate to an early version of Enquire Within but serve to illustrate the points being made.

Any Enquire Within session begins by preparing a Session Set-Up. This screen shows the purpose, the element class (current and past students), the qualifiers, and the element creation questions.

(Elements can be derived in several ways. Using element creation questions ensures that you get a good ‘scatter’ over the domain. In this case the element creation questions ask the user to name two students who are habitually disruptive, two who hardly ever cause trouble, two on whose behaviour you have had a positive effect, and two others at random). The element creation questions appear in a dialog box , which when completed looks like this:

and the elements are incorporated into the Session Set-Up Screen:

(At this point you can clear the element creation questions from the screen, so that no onlooker could identify the elements with the questions).

The next stage is generating constructs. The basic screen below shows the user’s first construct:

User: This is starting to feel interesting.

He produced some more constructs:

At this point we decided to move on to laddering, particularly laddering up.

Click here to go to the Laddering part of the story.

Click here to go to the Rating, Analysis and Differentiation part of the story

And in terms of using Enquire Within as an aid to learning, what we had got was exactly one of the things the program is designed to do: to help the user explore the edges of their perceptions and thereby grow new ones. Our teacher was longing to rush off and do this exercise with a newly-qualified teacher, as part of the mentoring contract, because the process was growing the number of constructs and hence the richness of the analysis which the new teacher could bring to a situation. (The more constructs you have about a given domain, the more broadly and subtly you can judge it).

Hopefully this is enough to show how a session works, although we have only seen the beginning. It will grow bigger. It may not be completed in one session, because some introspection takes time. You can add new elements and new constructs at any time, for many purposes including playing ‘what if’ games (e.g. what if Tess learned to understand more about the effect she has on others - what difference does that make?

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Ten Related Resources

• An investigation of attitudes of students and teachers about participating in a context-aware ubiquitous learning activity. Ju-Ling Shih, Hui-Chun Chu, Gwo-Jen Hwang and Kinshuk, National University of Tainan, Taiwan and Athabasca University, Canada.

  In recent years, digital learning has been converting from e-learning to m-learning because of the significant growth of wireless and mobile computing technologies. Students can learn any time and any where with mobile devices. Consequently, context-aware ubiquitous learning (u-learning) is emerging as a new research area. It integrates wireless, mobile and context awareness technologies in order to detect the situation of the learners and provide more seamless adaptive support in the learning process. In this paper, a context-aware u-learning environment is developed for learning about campus vegetation in elementary schools based on an innovative approach by employing repertory grid method in designing learning content. In addition, we probe the feasibility of context-aware u-learning in courses by soliciting feedback from the students and teachers through interviews and questionnaires. The findings reveal that the environment is capable of enhancing students' motivation and learning effectiveness. Moreover, it is also capable of reducing the teaching load while enabling better control of class order.

• Rebecca L. Herman, The University of Texas at Austin, USA. The repertory grid technique: path to teacher description or teacher potential? Teachers' decisions are based on certain criteria which teachers believe can justify what happens in their classes. Identifying and measuring those criteria requires multiple approaches in order to triangulate the data as thoroughly as possible. In one case study of a fourth grade teacher, a repertory grid technique was used as the format for a series of in-depth interviews to supplement classroom observations and other interview data. Each subsequent interview generated an increasingly evolved description of teaching that revealed interesting and new associations when the same information was presented to the teacher in a different format. A variety of explanations for the new perspectives are presented, along with recommendations for future research.
• Education and the Repertory Grid Interview
• Tutorials
• Some Resources for Understanding the Repertory Grid Interview
• Using Personal Construct Psychology with Pupils Who Experience Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties - A Case Study. Clarke, Steve (1999). Child Psychology and Psychiatry Review 4, 109-116. DOI:10.1017/S1360641799001987
• ATHERTON J S (2005) Learning and Teaching: Personal Construct Theory
• Aine Fitzpatrick, Young offenders perceptions of education. The aim of this research was to study the background of boys referred to an assessment centre by the juvenile courts, and to look in particular at the area of educational history.
• Simon Burnham, Let's Talk: Using Personal Construct Psychology to Support Children and Young People (Lucky Duck Books)
• Carolyn Hicks, Stephen Nixon, The Use of a Modified Repertory Grid Technique for Assessing the Self-Concept of Children in Local Authority Foster Care (1989). Two studies were carried out using a modified form of the repertory grid technique to investigate the self-esteem of children in Local Authority Care. The aim of the first study was to compare the self-perceptions and self-esteem of Children in Local Authority Care with a group of matched controls.

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