Bruce Johnson, Judy Peters, Phil Cormack, & Dave Williams

Faculty of Education

University of South Australia

Paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education Conference, Brisbane,

November 30th - December 4th, 1997

The National Middle Schooling Project introduced the innovation of the 'research circle', in which academics worked with a number of schools to develop a particular aspect of middle schooling practice, as a strategy for collaborative research and curriculum development. The research circles were intended to foster relationships between university and school based participants in which there was a reciprocal exchange of expertise and benefits to both groups. Specifically the objectives for the research circles were:

The emphasis on collaboration between teachers and university colleagues in the first two objectives are in line with a world wide trend away from traditional forms of educational research in which academics accessed schools for their own research purposes, with little active participation by teachers or resulting benefits for the schools. Zeichner (1994) comments on the growing dissatisfaction amongst teachers with this kind of exploitation of their work by the academic community:

The increased focus on teacher professionalism and the need for teachers to control their own professional development, and the recent emphasis on collaborative learning and collective inquiry through school-based development programs, has led to moves in a number of countries towards school/university partnerships for collaborative research and professional development. For instance, in Britain there is increased collaboration between universities and schools in the design of teacher education courses (McIntyre, Hagger and Burn, 1994) and in the United States, Professional Development Schools have been established where teacher educators and teachers work together to improve teaching and learning outcomes for students and students teachers (Center for Educational Renewal, 1994). In Australia, the 1993 Accord with the Teaching Profession tied all funding for professional development to programs promoting partnerships involving teacher organisations, education authorities and universities leading to a range of collaborative professional development programs through the National Professional Development Program.

According to Feldman (1993) there are benefits for both teachers and academics engaging in 'collaborative research and development' projects:

Sachs (1997) also highlights the increased relevance of educational research as a benefit of collaborative partnerships, as well and their potential to break down isolation and positively changing the climate of schools and universities by providing both parties with the opportunity to 'look outside their own domain with the view of building a community of interest whereby educational issues and practices are identified, debated and strategies implemented' (p. 1).

Although there are clear benefits to teachers and academics working collaboratively, the literature highlights a range of challenges that need to be overcome. For example, there are features of universities that discourage academics form involving themselves more closely with schools. These include the low priority of academic programs with school-based field service and the lack of rewards for academics engaged in practical school-based activities compared with other research (Goodlad, 1990; Gore, 1995). Another difficulty is negotiating partnerships in which power is shared equally and learning is reciprocal (Zeichner, 1994; Haggerty & Postlethwaite, 1995; Messner & Rauch, 1995; Feldman; 1993; Sachs 1997).

Informed by the literature and our own experience of collaborative university-school research in several large projects (Innovative Links - Peters, Dobbins, and Johnson, 1996[a]; National Schools Network research - Peters, Dobbins, and Johnson, 1996[b]; Classroom Discourse in the Middle Years Project - Burton, Cormack, and Wignell, forthcoming), we anticipated difficulties in establishing links between schools and the university team unless a number of organisational mechanisms were put in place at the outset of the project. Consequently, we established a support structure in order to promote coherence in, and commitment to common goals and ways of working. The support structure consisted of four elements:

To help schools to come to grips with the planning process, we developed a guide to planning which could be used, modified or discarded by the schools depending on their needs in the early stages of the planning process. This guide was presented to the teachers at the Sydney conference and each school used at least some aspects of this framework to support their programming in the first stages of the circle's operation.

The following questions were provided as a guide to the teachers:

Schools used this guide to develop plans for their research and development work.

Early indications from the schools' summaries of their experience in middle schooling and assessment as part of their initial application to join the project were that the teachers would need a chance to think about, and grapple with, concepts of authenticity in relation to assessment. Similarly, the members of the university team needed to develop a shared understanding of 'authentic assessment'. Unlike many research projects where the key concepts and terms to be used in the research are selected and used by the researchers in the application stage, in this project the term 'authentic assessment' was a given. Thus, along with the teachers, the university team needed to engage with the label, and to consider how it might be conceptualised from an Australian middle schooling perspective.

In the few weeks leading up to the Sydney conference, we conducted a literature search and gathered as many articles, chapters, books and reports as possible. Table 1 shows the six principles taken from this review of authentic assessment and reflection on the value of the literature for Australian schools. Also included were some key questions and issues that indicated 'gaps' in the literature. At the Sydney conference, these principles were presented to the teachers and discussed in relation to the research and materials development process. Schools and university researchers agreed to use these principles and key questions to design and evaluate their own efforts in authentic assessment.

These notes were frequently discussed, revisited, revised and expanded over the life of the project in conjunction with the teachers.

An important early task was to negotiate a timetable for the project processes. As a group, the university team and the school link teachers considered the draft framework for their research and the principles and questions for authentic assessment. The school link teachers then designed their research using the framework provided as a base and calling on an individually assigned university researcher for support when necessary. The plans were developed working back from the due date for the final school reports. Key dates were built into the plan. They included:

Each plan indicated the teacher colleagues in the participating schools who would work with the link teachers and the university researcher on the project.

The university management group appointed two project officers to provide support for the circle. Their major tasks included providing a central point for schools to send planning information and to cost and set up arrangements for the research circle meeting to be held in Adelaide in May.

We moved quickly to establish communication between schools and the university and between different schools to support the work of the project. A communications sheet was developed providing names and contact details for all circle participants.

Arrangements were made with school principals for the provision of grants to schools to support the research process, including some guidelines for the use of the monies that had been discussed with the link teachers.

In spite of our best efforts, a number of tensions emerged as we worked collaboratively with teachers in the six schools. We wish to raise awareness of the 'personal' side of university-school collaborative research as we believe that it is frequently ignored or denied when formal discussions and analyses of the process are undertaken. By focussing on the rarely mentioned 'human' side of collaborative work across sections of the education community, we hope to portray a more complete and authentic account of that work.

Considering the work of Hargreaves and Fullan (1992), it shouldn't have surprised us that the affective side of our work with teachers was so powerful and pervasive. While we didn't set out to create working relationships in which participants' thoughts and feelings were 'shared' and 'analysed' in the tradition of the Humanistic movement of the sixties, quite often the sub-text of our exchanges with teachers contained implicit references to issues of power, vulnerability, risk, suspicion, frustration, guilt, recognition, status, and fear of misunderstanding and exploitation. The intensity of these feelings was probably increased by the pressure within the project to 'produce the goods' according to a rather arbitrary, short and externally determined timeline. Ironically, however, the 'pressure-cooker' context of the project probably inhibited us from dealing with these affective responses in a more overt and considered way - we simply had to 'get on with the job' in order to meet agreed deadlines. It is only now that the project has been completed that we have time to reflect on how we felt at key points in our shared 'journey' and to acknowledge the importance and pervasiveness of participants' affective responses.

What follows is a somewhat one-sided view of the issues that caused tensions to arise during the Authentic Assessment project. It is one-sided in the sense that it reveals our thoughts, feelings and perspectives - as university based participants - as we reflect on the stresses and strains associated with conducting a large collaborative research project across four states. In another sense, however, the collaborative nature of the project meant that we were aware of many of the issues and problems that our school based colleagues encountered as they worked on the project. Our insights, while distilled through university oriented perceptual filters, were gained through many visits to participating schools, hours of informal discussions with teachers, more structured exchanges during four days of 'conferencing' together in Sydney and Adelaide, and the negotiation of each school's written account of their work in the project. It is on the basis of these insights that we offer a tentative account of the affective dimensions of the Authentic Assessment project.

Tensions arose within the project as we tried to come to grips with three crucial issues that affected our working relationships with teachers and the ultimate direction of the project. These issues were related to:

• difficulties finding time to actually work together due to the location of schools in four states, and to the demands of teachers' and academics' other work commitments;
• the different expectations of the project held by teachers and academics;
• negotiating issues of 'quality' in the project.

Truly collaborative research between academic and school participants requires the opportunity for extensive communication and the creation of relationships based on mutual trust and respect. In this project, interaction between school and academic colleagues was limited by the short time-line described above and by two other factors:

The two university colleagues who worked with the three interstate schools were limited in the amount of face to face contact they had with school participants because of the expense and time involved in travel. Project funding allowed for each university colleague to visit each interstate school for a period of one to two days on three occasions. They found this to be an inadequate amount of contact, especially in the early days of the research work, where school participants needed considerable support both in developing understandings and practices related to authentic assessment and, in some cases, dealing with pressures arising from the structures and culture of their particular school.

Long distance communication occurred via phone, fax and email, but probably the most important strategy implemented to partially overcome the frustrations caused by distance was that of building into the initial project time-line and budget the opportunity for university and school representatives to meet together for a two day research circle conference towards the end of the trialling period. This conference provided the opportunity for sustained communication between participants and rigorous interrogation of the research process and outcomes to date. Following this interrogation process there was enough time remaining for school participants to carry out a further cycle in their action research process, incorporating insights gained form peer feedback.

Distance was not the only factor limiting greater university-school interaction. In both the local and interstate schools, the hectic nature of school life made it very difficult for us to meet with all school participants. Even when we ventured interstate, we found that only some school participants could be released to meet with us. This was true of local schools as well. Although schools were given funding to provide release time to participants, teachers were often involved in programs or special activities which meant they were not happy to be absent form their classes. In one local school, the university colleague was only able to meet with five out of the six school participants on a Saturday, because the teachers felt that they could not absent themselves from their classes during the week. These teachers were also unable to find regular times to meet with each other over the life of the project. No adequate solution was found to this problem other than that university colleagues tended to communicate with the link key teacher/s in the school, who in turn communicated with other participants on an individual basis. This was not entirely satisfactory in terms of all participants having equal access to information and professional development opportunities.

The hectic pace of school life was not the only factor inhibiting interaction, though. Throughout the life of the project, all university academics were involved in other research projects, all had full teaching loads, two were coping with 're-location' to new university campuses, and two were undertaking part-time PhD research in their spare time! As a consequence, visits to schools, preparation for conferences, and the many writing tasks that were undertaken had to be fitted into work schedules that were already tight. The intensification of academic work can be traced, in part, to aspects of a changing university culture that increasingly values a diversified academic contribution across teaching, administration, research and consultancy, and community service. We felt the stresses and strains that accompany this intensification of work as we tried to juggle too many commitments, to too many people, in too short a time. Feelings of frustration, impatience, intolerance, and guilt were common, particularly at peak times when agreed deadlines loomed. Incredibly, though, interpersonal relations amongst us were positive and collegial despite these pressures. Ironically, the 'up-side' of collaborative work was felt almost simultaneously with the 'down-side' as group members supported each other through the 'tough' times

Finally, the quality of our interactions with teachers was inhibited, at least initially, by what we perceived to be a lack of understanding by our school based colleagues of us, as contemporary academics, and the nature of our multi-faceted work; early in the project we sensed a quaint carry-over from earlier times of the view of academics as 'dons' who do little more than give the occasional lecture and contemplate esoteric 'theory'. We see the challenging of this stereotype of the 'academic' and the re-definition of our expertise as teacher educators as a crucial outcome of the project. As teachers became more aware of the nature of our work, and began to value our skills as provocateurs, interrogators, facilitators, supporters, organisers, synthesisers, writers and explainers, the quality of our interactions with teachers improved dramatically and our sense of satisfaction with our collaborative relationships also rose.

It is probably stating the obvious to suggest that different participants in the project had different needs, hopes, goals and expectations. With such diverse participants as teachers grappling with the tyranny of immediacy, principals with concerns over the nature, scope and 'management' of school reform, and academics responding to the pressure to produce quantifiable 'outputs' in the emerging free-market oriented university sector, it is amazing that any common ground could be negotiated, let alone mutually satisfying outcomes achieved.

In most accounts of collaborative research between teachers and university researchers, the particular needs and concerns of classroom teachers are usually discussed more than those of their university based colleagues (see, for example, Williams, Tunney & Grearly, 1996). This is understandable as the status and power differentials rarely favour classroom teachers in these arrangements, and teachers' practices are frequently the focus of the research. However, there are compelling reasons for articulating academics' needs, hopes, and expectations. For example, Tikunoff and Ward (1983) maintain that collaborative research needs to inquire into and resolve the problems and concerns of classroom teachers, but that it also needs to meet the particular goals of university researchers if the relationship between participants is to be equitable (cited in Feldman, 1993: 343).

As we pointed out earlier, the ultimate goal of the project was 'the development of a set of curriculum materials which document the outcomes of each school's particular approach to authentic assessment' (Cormack, Johnson, Peters, & Williams, 1997:1). There was an explicit attempt to link the achievement of local goals (develop better ways of assessing particular students) with the achievement of more global goals (the development of publishable materials). However, the apparent simplicity of this overarching goal masked the difficulties associated with implementing practical procedures designed to achieve both aspects of it. It also had the effect of sending underground feelings of frustration, confusion, and uncertainty as we vigorously pursued one aspect of the goal (the development of quality materials) sometimes without due regard for teachers' preoccupation with the other aspect of the goal (improving local practices).

As we felt under enormous pressure to develop both practices and documentation that would stand up to scrutiny from a national perspective, we were conscious of the need to provide both support and challenge to teachers. As Fullan and Stiegelbauer's suggest,

While the onus was on the teachers to research authentic assessment in practice, we felt that we had to provide both the support and 'pressure' that would ensure a 'quality product'. We used three strategies to support and challenge teachers over the trialling period:

All members of the university team had previously worked with schools in collaborative research projects and had experience in using critical questioning with teachers as a mechanism for focussing research on which students were advantaged and disadvantaged by particular practices. As can be seen in Table 1, these kinds of questions were raised with teachers in the initial stages of the planning process, and again at various stages of their trialling process.

A particularly effective use of critical questioning occurred when one university colleague devised a set of 'critical questions' for use with school participants on one of his interstate visits (see Table 2). These questions were then used as the basis for a feedback guide which was used by participants to 'interrogate' their own and other schools' developing practices at the two day conference held towards the end of the trialling period. As each school presented their research process and outcomes to date, the other attendees at the conference (university and school participants, the Coordinator of the National Middle Schooling Project and the Coordinator of the National Schools Network in Victoria) wrote comments against the questions and these were then used as the basis for feedback and debriefing with school representatives in small group situations.

This proved to be a reasonably stressful time for some school and university colleagues. For instance, one teacher who had been working on developing authentic assessment in regard to her students' listening skills had presented a student self evaluation sheet developed with her students which contained criteria such as 'gives eye contact'. Peer feedback raised questions about the situation specific and culturally exclusive nature of such criteria which initially threw the teacher 'off balance' to the point where she was unsure about continuing with her research process. However, through dialogue with school and university colleagues throughout the day she developed a plan of action whereby she would 'problematise' the initial list with her students. This process led to another cycle of trialling in which the teacher and her students reconstructed their understanding of 'effective listening'.

Closely aligned with critical questioning was a gradual breaking down by school and university colleagues of the idea that there was such a thing as 'good practice' in regard to authentic assessment. Over the time, we moved away from the idea that it was possible for the research circle to produce a range of assessment practices which we could present as 'good' practices for all students in all situations. We came to believe that assessment practices are technologies that are in themselves, neither essentially good or bad, but rather that they have different effects depending on their context and use. Rather than present examples of 'good' practice, the purposes of the project documentation were realigned to:

With these re-negotiated purposes in mind, teachers in each school wrote a case study that provided a rich description of the assessment approaches trialled, what happened during the trial (both positive and negative), and what was learned. The case studies were accompanied, where appropriate, by illustrative examples of assessment materials.

Problematising all assessment practices in terms of their potential for advantaging or disadvantaging particular students, proved enormously liberating for school and university participants. We no longer felt the discomfort which had accompanied our initial perception that we needed to produce a curriculum document containing exemplary assessment practices. Rather, we felt that we could make an enormously valuable contribution to the field by exemplifying the process of theorising and problematising assessment practices against those issues which we had identified as key issues of authentic assessment.

We faced a dilemma when making judgements about the quality of the written documentation produced by school participants. On the one hand, we felt that university participants should not have any greater say than teachers about what constituted an acceptable level of quality, but on the other hand, we were concerned that the practices described in the final report, and the way it was written, should enhance the professional credibility of all participants, including ourselves. Some teachers also felt the pressure to produce a 'high quality written product' and looked for considerable support and advice as they struggled to describe and analyse the essence of their practices in formal 'academic' writing.

When it came to compiling the final written report and taking action to improve its overall quality, we did take a leading role. Drafts of the case studies were written by school participants and then sent to their respective university colleagues for comment and amendment. However, the quality of these case studies varied enormously, presenting us with the delicate problem of how to respond to them without jeopardising our working

relationships with teachers, or our commitment to produce a consistent, high quality report on the work of the research circle

For some teachers and university colleagues this was the most tense period of the whole project as it exposed vulnerabilities in aspects of teachers' and academics' work. Feldman (1993) makes an interesting observation about the capacity of collaborative research to expose the different vulnerabilities of those who are involved. In this case, it exposed teachers' practices to close scrutiny, as well their ability to write about their experiences in a fairly formal way, and it exposed our abilities to manage the Project and produce a quality publication based on teachers' work. Dealing with different peoples' vulnerabilities required tact, patience and diplomacy; it also required strength, persistence, and a degree of ruthlessness in promoting the collective good, sometimes over the interests of individuals.

While we did our best to establish planning and administrative structures that supported collaborative work between our university and schools, we readily admit that tensions arose in the course of our work together, some of which were satisfactorily addressed while others simply had to be tolerated. The fact that we were working in a team of four university colleagues was a source of enormous emotional support in dealing with the frustrations, anxieties and vulnerabilities which emerged throughout this project, as well as providing a rich resource when it came to solving problems. We learnt a great deal about the affective dimensions of collaborative work and reassert the importance of recognising the 'human' side of forming research partnerships. We believe that the process of reflective review we have used to identify sources of tension and affective dimensions of collaborative research, and strategies for resolving them, has left us better equipped to ensure that future collaborations are even more productive for all participants.

Dr Bruce Johnson

University of South Australia

Underdale Campus

Holbrooks Rd

Underdale SA 5032

Australia

E-mail: bruce.johnson@unisa.edu.au