A “critical friend” in the action research process is a trusted agent who gives deep insights from the outside into the nature, quality, and path of your introspection. They help keep you grounded, and offer triangulation points in the sense-making process as you grapple with your own questions and insights. They act as sounding […]
Tag: curriculum
College, teach thyself?
My commentary from a discussion thread at the CAC blogs on the topic of General Officers education and selection. I am interested in how we improve the capability of the college to support life long learningi nour student officers (and faculty). I argue that our college should be as flexible as the organizations we are […]
Action research, personal journal entry 20090124
The first time I prepared this for an entry on our doctoral discussion forum , I constructed it inside Moodle (our discussion environment; its horrible), attached the file, pushed the upload button only to lose it in hyperspace when my Internet connection crashed. It was important enough to me to rework the piece, however and […]
Reflecting on personal learning environments: teacher as model student
At the last CTU residency, on the last day my breakthrough insight was to approach the research question on leader curriculum development at the Command and General Staff College from the perspective of giving voice to the students, who are professional military officers operating at the graduate level and fresh from combat experience in Iraq […]
Edge.org: this should be interesting and challenging
Sigh: because i dont have enough on my plate to keep my attention fully engaged. Still, they have some powerful info from one of my heroes, Daniel Kahneman whose intellect spans the whole globe. “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them […]
Hearing the Voiceless- Part 2
In the ongoing conversation re: Action research into an entreprenurial curriculum for middle school and high school age students, one of our fellow students offered a detailed set of interventions based on the initial readout from the first exploratory meeting, a reported by the “insider”. While the ideas were excellent and interesting, I felt moved to […]
Hearing the voiceless
a friend of mine is starting a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project inquiring into an entreprenurial curriculum that has both enabled and disabled students in her classroom. From an email, she said: I met with the students who are disabled, and we had a discussion on their feelings toward working with their counterparts who are […]
Transformational Leadership through Action Research
I have been convening groups of faculty and students to consider the future of our professional education in our college, and relating it to the larger issue of learning organizations and sustainability in the world. As part of this I have been considering the TRADOC white papers on Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design (CACD) and […]
Asking good questions vs :”knowing where you want to go” in participatory action research (PAR)
In the very beginning of a PAR (participatory action research) project, I would draw a distinction between asking good questions and “knowing where you want to go”. Going into the PAR with a preconceived notion of a certain outcome or of a preferred method of proceeding, particularly as a researcher, can lead to advocacy. It may […]
Straddling the fence: the challenge and rewards of the practitioner-scholar
here is a snippet from the author’s preface to the CIA’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. It is an excellent free resource from our CIA. He captures for me the essence of the challenge of being the practitioner scholar: being the transmission gearbox between the world of rigorous, focused, research-oriented scholarship and the broad, immediate world […]