Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World: The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era

5Research Schools

| 69 5 Research Schools Connecting Research and Practice at the Ross School Christina Hinton and Kurt W. Fischer At a typical research conference, Sophie would be tucked neatly into a PowerPoint presentation: underachiever. This description is cold, calm, wrapped in tidy numbers and politically correct phrases. An underachiever is a negative outcome from an equation of risk factors. She does not have a scar on her left knee from the time she fell off the monkey bars. She does not twirl her coffee-colored hair with her pencil when she is lost in a thought. She does not find a friend with tears in her eyes and make silly faces until they both break into an uncontrollable gale of giggles. Most education research treats students, like Sophie, as objects to be manipulated. As Kohn (1999) notes, “Some social scientists specializing in education may as well be crunching numbers about E. coli or the electromagnetic spectrum” (25). Education is not about E. coli, or outcomes and risk factors: it is about people. Where is the voice of the people in schools in education research? The education system currently relies on a top-down structure whereby researchers write recommendations for policy makers, who impose them on administrators, practitioners, and students. We need to reform this system to involve teachers, students, and administrators as partners in shaping education research and policy. In most successful sectors of American industry and government, researchers collaborate with practitioners to test theory in practice and adjust research-based developments accordingly. In medicine, researchers work with doctors to refine newly developed medications and procedures through hospital testing. In agriculture, researchers partner with farmers to improve new seeds, equipment, and farming methods through field tests. In traffic safety, meteorology, cosmetics, in field after field, practitioners provide practical results that inform research-based developments. In education , however, there is little sustained interaction between researchers and 70 | Christina Hinton and Kurt W. Fischer practitioners, leaving many researchers trapped in an ivory tower of statistical significance, PowerPoint presentations, and academic jargon that is far removed from the smaller, more intimate world of pencils, monkey bars, and giggles. Researchers should partner with practitioners, students, and administrators to test educational theory in practice. Theory becomes more sophisticated and differentiated when refracted through the complex and dynamic classroom. A method of reading instruction, for example, takes a very different shape in the pristine abstractions of a researcher’s mind than when tangled in a classroom of tiny quarrels, waving hands, and two little boys who are taking turns wiggling their ears. Putting theory into practice in the messy classroom provides invaluable feedback for fine-tuning theoretical models and shaping practice. For example, classroom results have revealed that phonologically based interventions are effective for some children with dyslexia but not others. This result has guided researchers to a more nuanced understanding of dyslexia and more effective intervention techniques (Fischer, Bernstein, and Immordino-Yang 2007; Wolf and Bowers 1999). Researchers and practitioners should use formative assessment to continually shape theory and practice throughout the learning process (Lesser 1974; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] 2005). Recent changes in the landscape of research on learning augment the need for sustained collaboration between researchers and practitioners (Hinton and Fischer 2008). Powerful new brain-imaging tools, breakthroughs in genetics, and innovative cognitive methods have brought biology and cognitive science to the center of research on learning (Fischer, Immordino-Yang, and Waber 2007; Hinton, Miyamoto, and della-Chiesa 2008; OECD 2007; Stern 2005). There is tremendous potential for this new research to improve education, but working across disciplines brings new challenges as well as new opportunities. Biology and cognitive science have deeply rooted disciplinary cultures with field-specific language and methods , which makes integrating this new research on learning with pedagogy especially challenging. A reciprocal interaction between research and practice is needed now more than ever to ensure that research from this emerging field of mind, brain, and education will actualize as improved learning in classrooms. Research schools support sustainable collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Research schools are living laboratories where researchers work alongside practitioners to train educators, carry out research, and Research Schools | 71 disseminate findings. Research schools partner with a university to field-test theory in vivo and disseminate practical results to other schools, universities , and policy agencies. In this way, they bring the voice of the people in schools into the world of education research and...