The Use of Metaphors With LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY ® For Harmony and Innovation

Organisational changes within Higher Education Institutions (HEI) over recent years have had a great effect on the roles of Higher Education (HE) staff and their attitudes, experience and satisfaction within those roles. The changes in the way HEIs are funded have resulted in institutional policies that are strongly market driven. Alongside this, policies of widening access to HE have led to the ‘massification’ of student numbers and the intensification of the workload of HE staff. The increasing focus on measures and evaluations between and within institutions, with league tables and in the UK at least, Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its previous incarnations along with the recently introduced Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), has led to a culture of audit and managerialism both at the level of institutional policy and at the micro level within faculties and departments. These effects have been particularly acute in traditionally practice-based programmes and post-92 institutions, where these drivers are at times at odds with the motivations and expertise of many of the staff who joined these institutions under different conditions. This paper presents LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® as a method of enabling members of staff with diverse expertise, experience and expectations to come together to work towards a shared strategic plan in the light of the changing HE culture. The method is applied to a teacher education department within a post-92 university, where despite differing views of the challenges facing the department, consensus is achieved through the building of shared metaphors and joint narratives

Evidence-based teaching: A simple view of “science”

This paper examines the insistent claims by advocates of evidence-based teaching that it is a rigorous scientific approach. The paper questions the view that randomised controlled trials and meta-analyses are the only truly scientific methods in educational research. It suggests these claims are often based on a rhetorical appeal which relies on too simple a notion of “science”. Exploring the tacit assumptions behind “evidence-based teaching”, the paper identifies an empiricist and reductionist philosophy of science, and a failure to recognise the complexity of education and pedagogy. Following a discussion of large-scale syntheses of evidence (Hattie’s Visible Learning; the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit), it examines in detail one strand of the latter concerning sports participation, which is used to illustrate flaws in procedures and the failure to take seriously the need for causal explanations.https://doi.org/10.1080/13803611.2019.161799225pubpub1-

A comparative investigation of emerging adults’ moral thinking and communication competencies in Taiwan, the USA, and the UK

Emerging adulthood is a unique and distinct period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity exploration in developed and developing countries. This study aimed to investigate emerging adults’ moral thinking and communication competencies, and their differences by socio-demographic factors (i.e., gender, religious affiliation, college major, educational stages), in Taiwan, the USA, and the UK, as well as compare similarities/common trends and diversities between the three groups. We modified and utilized the MTC-II scale, including two dilemma stories relating to an individual and societal moral dilemma, to assess 743 valid sample participants. We found that females in the Taiwan group scored highest on the MTC-II scale across the three samples, whereas religious affiliation differentiated the USA and the UK groups. We also noted differences in scores relating to the two stories and associated moral levels. These findings are interpreted as a foundation for future research and educational practice

Lego®, Serious Play TM: Thinking About Teaching and Learning

LEGO® Serious Play™ (LSP) is a methodology which has been developed primarily for use in business contexts, initially with Real-Time Identity for You, Real-Time Strategy for the Team and Real-Time Strategy for the Enterprise. However, many of the principles which underpin the methodology are supported within the educational research literature. The findings discussed here represent some of the efforts in reclaiming LSP for the educational domain. The current study introduces LSP as a method of getting at participants’ understanding of their own professional identities. It details the process of the development of workshops and reflects on the aspects of ‘What Works’ within and across a small number of educational contexts. Results from two distinct groups are discussed, pre-service Teachers and Employees in a Small / Medium Enterprise (SME)

Everybody’s monkey is important: LEGO® Serious Play® as a methodology for enabling equality of voice within diverse groups

This paper explores the theoretical underpinning of the LEGO® Serious Play® methodology and highlights the affordances of the method in the context of eliciting thoughts and views within groups made up of a range of stakeholders. It provides insight into how LEGO® Serious Play® can be integrated into discursive research practices amongst stakeholders, in this case for International Education. The work reports on the application of the method in a workshop with participants, diverse in terms of gender, age, national and linguistic background, professional experience and seniority. The workshop explored and developed conceptions of International Education. The LEGO® Serious Play® method is shown to overcome some of the hierarchies and hegemonies, which can exist in such contexts, allowing equality of voice amongst participants, such that each expresses their views or opinions, which are given equal consideration and legitimacy. This resulted in high levels of engagement, which enabled the presentation, and inclusion, of a broad spectrum of ideas, as well as the development of a shared vision of research in the field of International Education. Findings in this paper show that the LEGO® Serious Play® method has enabled imaginative conceptualisations of the rationale, role and potential for research in International Education

A digital image processing approach to large-scale turbulence studies.

An image processing approach to turbulence studies has been developed. The approach employs a structure tracking technique to quantify the movement of coherent, large-scale turbulent structures. The 'structure tracking' technique has been applied to the shear layer of a low speed jet issuing into a low speed crossflow. A study of the characteristics of the turbulent flow within this region involved comparative measurements with hot-wire anemometry measurements within the same flow regime and fractal analysis of the flow visualisation images used by the tracking routine. Fractal analysis was applied to flow visualisation images to educe a range of length scales made apparent by the flow visualisation equipment The results obtained with the structure tracking technique included the instantaneous velocity of the structures and a measure of their length scales. The instantaneous velocity measurements were used to calculate a turbulence characteristic associated with the structures. Further analysis revealed subsets of this turbulence characteristic involving the variation in average velocity of individual structures as well as variations in the instantaneous velocity of individual structures. Where possible, the results of the structure tracking technique were compared to those achieved by hot wire anemometry and good correspondence was found between the mean flow characteristics measured by both techniques. The results of the two techniques began to diverge in the regions of the flow where conventional hot-wire anemometry was unable to discriminate between the flow associated with the jet and that associated with the crossflow. In such regions, time-averaged hot-wire anemometry produced results which combined the measurements in both flow regimes and therefore attenuated any characteristics of the jet which were significantly different from those of the crossflow. In the same flow regions the structure tracking technique was able to measure those characteristics specifically associated with the jet, producing results, which reflected the behaviour of the jet more accurately

Damaging the Case for Improving Social Science Methodology Through Misrepresentation: Re-Asserting Confidence in Hypothesis Testing as a Valid Scientific Process

This paper is a response to Gorard's article, 'Damaging real lives through obstinacy: re-emphasising why significance testing is wrong' in Sociological Research Online 21(1). For many years Gorard has criticised the way hypothesis tests are used in social science, but recently he has gone much further and argued that the logical basis for hypothesis testing is flawed: that hypothesis testing does not work, even when used properly. We have sympathy with the view that hypothesis testing is often carried out in social science contexts when it should not be, and that outcomes are often described in inappropriate terms, but this does not mean the theory of hypothesis testing, or its use, is flawed per se. There needs to be evidence to support such a contention. Gorard claims that: 'Anyone knowing the problems, as described over one hundred years, who continues to teach, use or publish significance tests is acting unethically, and knowingly risking the damage that ensues.' This is a very strong statement which impugns the integrity, not just the competence, of a large number of highly respected academics. We argue that the evidence he puts forward in this paper does not stand up to scrutiny: that the paper misrepresents what hypothesis tests claim to do, and uses a sample size which is far too small to discriminate properly a 10% difference in means in a simulation he constructs. He then claims that this simulates emotive contexts in which a 10% difference would be important to detect, implicitly misrepresenting the simulation as a reasonable model of those contexts

Main Street Parkrose

PlanPDX worked to assess existing district conditions and assist in the development of goals for the district that could inform and guide future improvement efforts. Utilizing a variety of research methods including community outreach efforts, in-person interviews, technical analysis and organizing two well-attended community workshops, the Vision Team and PlanPDX successfully generated a set of recommendations for Main Street Park Rose. This project was conducted under the supervision of Ethan Seltzer and Sumner Sharpe