In my sabbatical professional life this week, I have finished a rough draft on the academic questioning article that I was writing. I read through the draft last night, and I found that in my results section I wrote the findings and discussion paired together; this will work with some journals or even in a white paper, but will not work with all journals. I have to find where I want this article to live in order to edit effectively. This is something I know many colleagues and other writers look for and know from the start, but this has never been my way.
Writing with an end journal in mind is like using rubrics to me—people love rubrics because it gives them a road map for what is expected. I, however, have always found rubrics to distract me from the writing and discovery process giving me a formula to follow rather than letting discovery organically come about. This probably sounds crazy to many but I have always written a piece how I have wanted to write it and then I try to fit it into what the rubric (in schooling) or the journal article (professionally) has asked for. It works for me, as I did well in school and do have publications, but it makes the editing process a little more difficult. I guess that is a sacrifice I have been willing to endure because I enjoy the initial draft writing process more. Is it effective, time-wise, though and does this matter more? I would have to adapt my ways—and maybe in the next paper I write I do this—to figure that out. So, my editing task, once I find the journal that I want to submit this paper to, will most likely be to separate out the results and the discussion section. Here is an example of how a paragraph in the results section of the paper is written thus far: “Most academic questioning asked by teacher preparation instructors observed in programs that were rated as needs improvement did not progress from basic to complex higher order thinking. Instead questioning remained at a low-level where candidates were often disengaged from the course and were not asked to deepen their own thinking or understanding or provide discourse on topics covered. University faculty need to explicitly model and make connections for candidates to see the desired instructional behavior, high level questioning, in action. This needs to be consistently done in all university course-work. University teachers needs to encourage higher order thinking and push learning to a higher level for both the teacher candidates and the students they teach. Modeling and labeling this skill provide candidates a foundational knowledge of how to use academic questioning in their own classrooms.” The first two sentences here are objective data gleaned from codes from the final reports, but the rest of the paragraph becomes a discussion on these first two sentences. When I read the paper last night, I noticed I carried this pattern throughout the results section. The eight pages of results could easily be cut down to two pages if I change this. This will be where I will now have to focus my efforts. In reading through the entirety of the paper last night, I started to wonder if I were to look at teaching videos submitted to the National Board for Professional Teachers would fit the stated problem I found. Are 80% of the questions used in the classroom asking students to do something other than think—with 60 percent require simple recall, and the other 20 percent procedural? I wonder if I could classify the question types of those seeking board certification and find something different. Maybe this is my next study, once I finish analyzing all of the report data that I have right now.
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February 2023
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