Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic required a transformation into innovative classroom pedagogies that expected language learners to become more active and shoulder more responsibilities than before. In this article, I report on my first experience of doing exploratory practice to examine online flipped classrooms used to develop English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ self-directed learning. In a classroom-based mixed-methods study, I examined and puzzled over classroom practices that may promote learners’ self-directed readiness in the context of a university-level writing class. The results indicated a significant increase in my students’ desire for learning and self-control. They also showed that learners need technical assistance and psychological support to increase their self-directed learning skills and become more self-directed and autonomous language learners. The article concludes with a critical reflection on my first exploratory practice endeavor and what the whole process of puzzling about my classroom activities has brought to my teaching practice.
I Introduction
The Covid-19 pandemic had a globally transformative impact on English language education in various ways including curricular design (Mishra et al., 2020; Sun, 2023) and material development (Gacs et al., 2020; Glas et al., 2023). Azorín (2020) compares this transformation in education to a ‘supernova’, which happens when stars explode and die of old age (p. 381). My teaching context and English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom was probably only a tiny asteroid in space but it was also greatly affected by this supernova. The sudden changes regarding the mode of instruction caught me underprepared and urged me to make decisions to minimize the negative impacts of those swift changes. In the English Language Teaching (ELT) Department where I worked as a teacher educator, keeping students engaged and motivated in online classes was one of the main topics at the departmental meetings and personal exchanges that took place while we were trying to figure out how to navigate through and even survive that supernova.
Trying to understand how students respond to the sudden instructional changes, I contacted them informally to understand their perspectives. Many mentioned courses offering the same content with the same instructional design but only with digital tools that required them to attend online sessions; the main struggle for them was to ‘keep [themselves] on track’ (from a personal exchange with a student). Having conversations with other colleagues who had similar challenges, my puzzlement urged me to question my existing practices and understand whether a new instructional design could help learners sustain their engagement.
The situation led me to examine the learning space that I cultivated. Getting myself familiar with learners’ perspectives first gave me the idea of including them into my practitioner research as co-researchers following the principled framework of exploratory practice (EP). I had been hearing about this form of practitioner research but did not have the opportunity to try it out in my own classroom. In EP, practitioners collaborate with learners and work on puzzles-to-understand rather than problems-to-solve to highlight the importance of why questions that emerge in the classroom context, which is a central characteristic of EP (Allwright & Hanks, 2009). Relatedly, we explored the puzzlement regarding self-directed learning together in a university based EFL course: why did my students struggle to ‘keep on track’? The coursework was based on a flipped design, which essentially swaps the order of classroom instruction and homework. Bergmann and Sams (2012) point out that there is more in a flipped classroom than swapping their order; the flipped design gives the responsibility to students of actively taking part in learning by asking questions about homework, which is covered before the class. This way homework acts as a preparation for the forthcoming lesson and creates connections between the lesson content and all out-of-class work.
My students’ inclusion as co-researchers in such coursework, which was new to me even though I engaged in different forms of practitioner research such as participatory action research (Uştuk, 2023) or lesson study (Uştuk & De Costa, 2021), proved to be challenging. However, while reflecting on my practitioner research and reporting it, I found that the whole process provided me with a critical understanding of inclusivity and my own professional identity. Furthermore, the participating students were prospective language educators and I intended to show them an example of how language educators can include student voice in their reflections through practitioner research. This positioning was unusual in my academic culture where teachers are seen as the sole source of knowledge and judgement; therefore, I intended to dismantle such an authoritative discourse for them by involving the learners-as-co-researchers into my puzzlement as I attempted to transform my practice. To summarize, my students and I used EP and scrutinized why a flipped classroom utilizing a web-based writing tool has influenced the self-directed learning experiences of EFL learners at a university-level academic writing course in Turkey.
1 Exploratory practice
EP is a form of practitioner research in which teachers and learners examine the quality of language classroom life while engaging in normal pedagogic activities as investigative tools (Hanks, 2017). Learners’ ‘radical positioning . . . as co-researchers’ (Hanks, 2019, p. 143) distinguishes EP from other forms of practitioner research while it is modelled around a set of principles. Underscoring the importance of adopting a principled approach, Allwright and Hanks (2009) present seven principles: (1) They prioritize quality of life for language teachers and learners. (2) They state that EP should aim to understand quality of life prior to bringing any change to it. (3) They underline the importance of including everybody in the process of understanding (4) so that this work can involve everyone in the classroom (5) in a spirit of mutual development. (6) While framing EP as a continuous and dynamic enterprise, Allwright and Hanks (2009) recommend that teachers integrate research into teaching by using normal classroom activities as investigative tools in order to (7) minimize the existing workload for teachers and curricular burden for students for the ultimate goal of enabling research sustainability.
Hanks (2019) provided a comprehensive review of the existing scholarship and found that EP, as implemented in various country contexts, focused on some distinctive topics such as anxiety and motivation. In one study from Turkey, also within the context of the current study, Biçer (2018) used EP to inform the curriculum design of a course on English for academic purposes (EAP). He found that learners have a lot to contribute to the design of the curriculum, yet they are rarely represented in such decision-making processes. In a different EAP context, Salvi (2017) scrutinized learner autonomy through EP and gave power to students to make curricular decisions regarding pedagogies and methods. She explored the instructional decisions’ influence on autonomous learning. Biçer’s (2018) and Salvi’s (2017) experiences demonstrated that such an approach had a positive impact on classroom engagement. Bearing these studies in mind, EP was indeed a suitable model to examine the major curricular changes that I undertook while puzzling over my teaching situation.
2 Self-directed learning
Self-directed learning is conceptualized as ‘a method of instruction that can be defined in terms of the amount of responsibility the learner accepts for his or her own learning’ (Fisher & King, 2010, p. 44). It is associated with learners who have the desire to take the initiative in their learning processes and strategies with or without the help of others. That said, self-directed learning is related to the amount of responsibility that learners are ready to shoulder. Relatedly, readiness for self-directed learning has been a key term for understanding the degree to which learners have ‘the attitudes, abilities, and personality characteristics necessary for self-directed learning’ (Wiley, 1983, p. 182). According to Fisher et al. (2001), self-directed learning readiness was composed of learners’ self-management skills, desire for learning, and self-control. Self-management is learners’ ability to organize learning procedures. The desire for learning is related to learners’ desire and enjoyment to learn new information even when challenged. Finally, self-control is about learners’ understanding of responsibility, abilities, and control over their learning endeavors. To this end, the concept is related to the on-the-ground issue that I had in my teaching context: helping my students to keep themselves on track while learning the language. The major issue that I had in mind was understanding how ready they were to shoulder this responsibility.
Fisher et al. (2001) argue that readiness for self-directed learning is related to the learners’ preferences for instructional structure and can change over time as a result of experience/training (Dyck, 1986). Thus, I thought self-directed learning could provide a framework for me to understand my students’ experiences of keeping themselves on track in light of the curricular changes that I introduced. Salvi’s (2017) EP study has provided some insight into the affinity between this type of practitioner research and autonomous language learning; however, more classroom-based studies are needed to better understand self-directed learning in the EAP contexts. Also, driven by the puzzlement, I needed to introduce innovative ways to develop my classroom quality of life to ensure that my teaching would survive the supernova. To this end, I puzzled over how I could sustain engagement in my writing course among the students so they could keep themselves on track. Drawing on this puzzlement and investigating their self-directed learning, I asked the following research questions:
• Research question 1: To what degree were the students ready to direct their learning before and after the course?
• Research question 2: How did the instructional design of the course influence their self-directed learning?
II Methodology
Before moving into the methodological framework, it is important to clarify how the puzzlement emerged in my teaching context. In the first fully online semester following the Covid-19 pandemic (Fall 2020), my EAP class was in chaos. The biggest issue was to keep the learners engaged and encourage them to participate in online sessions. Also in the 2020 class, I observed that some students showed increased interest as I started to provide what I called ‘foreshadowing’, which is originally a literary term referring to the narrator giving a hint in advance about what is to come later in the story. In my case, I was foreshadowing the course content to come in the following weeks by providing the students with some preparation materials to carry out as homework. At the same time, like all the practitioners, I was bombarded with online seminars, workshops, and courses to learn about new pedagogies attempting to address the challenges of teaching after the supernova over the 2020–21 academic year. I first started hearing about the flipped classroom approach in those sessions. I realized that flipped learning was an instructional design that relies on my foreshadowing strategy to help learners stay on track. In the following year’s class (Fall 2021), I decided to design my syllabus in a flipped way.
Originating from this background, I initiated the current study although I acknowledge that my endeavor was based on conversations with my colleagues, students, and my classroom experiences. I framed my engagement in research as EP for two reasons:
• Learners’ lack of engagement in online classes was a problem, so I decided to employ the flipped design in my teaching based on my pandemic-related professional development and classroom experiences with the results of foreshadowing the content in my regular practice. From this perspective, I focused on a puzzlement instead of a problem.
• I realized that the learners and I were on the same page about our conceptualizations of the root of the problem: our unpreparedness of learning to learn and teach online. Thus, I decided to introduce my puzzlement to the learners to include them in the research through potentially exploitable pedagogic activities (PEPAs), which I explain in the data collection section.
I brought up the idea of investigating self-directed learning in the flipped classroom through EP at the beginning of the semester. In our first meeting, I clarified to the students that their participation would not affect their final grade, and that the intention was to increase the quality of their online learning experience. In the same meeting, the probable issues that affect students’ autonomy, self-directed learning, and personal learner strategies were discussed to provide them with a conceptual base. Instead of treating them only as study participants, I wanted us to have the same understanding of the basic concepts.
To work on the puzzlement, both quantitative and qualitative methods were utilized. I knew that the use of quantitative approach is not epistemologically favoured in practitioner research. Nevertheless, the basic quantitative analyses that I undertook in this research were in the methodological repertoire that I had previously used to make sense of classroom-based issues. I wanted to explore the potential of this methodology when paired with qualitative methods. In addition, the use of quantitative methods could help to identify and set the questions at the beginning of the investigation (Dikilitaş & Griffiths, 2017). This was a critical step for me when I was puzzled by my puzzling in that I needed to rely on multiple resources while putting the pieces of my instructional puzzle together. Relatedly, in her critical review, Hanks (2019) argues that EP needs to go beyond the quantitative–qualitative dichotomy and needs innovative research methodologies. My venture of drawing on a mixed-methods design aims to address this need.
1 The EAP course
The critical reading and writing course was offered to second-year undergraduate students in my department. Its objective was to increase the academic writing skills of EFL learners with a particular focus on the concepts of argumentation and critical thinking. The coursework included two hours of synchronous online meetings every week for 14 weeks and required one hour a week of asynchronous work. It comprised seven modules, each of which lasted two weeks.
By using the modular design, I intended to break the course content into chunks, so it is easier for the students to regulate and direct their learning trajectories. The modules targeted various EFL academic writing skills (e.g. argumentation, critical thinking, information literacy, referencing), and each was finalized with an academic writing task on Kialo-Edu, an open-access online platform that allows asynchronous debates. Figure 1 illustrates a screenshot from a classroom discussion. Each module included a content pack published in advance, and the classroom activities included the revision of the content, related activities in groups, and feedback sessions on the Kialo-Edu engagements. These packs comprised video and text-based materials from textbooks and open educational resources such as TED videos, mini-documentaries, or newspaper articles. The learners compiled a portfolio that consisted of their Kialo-Edu, activity outputs, and peer feedback which they provided and received.
Screenshot from the Kialo-Edu assignment.
Kialo-Edu allows teachers to create virtual communities. Learners can reach community discussion threads and see the main argument on the top that was posted by the teacher in Figure 1. The learners have two options: to post a pro argument using the green plus icon or a con argument by clicking on the red one in response to the main argument. Once posted, other learners can click on their peers’ arguments and continue the debate by posting further arguments.
All seven modules included one Kialo-Edu assignment that required learners to post two arguments in total: at least one argument in response to the instructor’s main argument and another one responding to their peers’ arguments. The learners were allowed to post more than one argument. They were able to rate the arguments, and their rating is indicated by a five-piece line on the top-left of each argument as in Figure 1. In addition to responding with further arguments, the learners were able to comment on their peers’ arguments via the speech bubble icon on the top-right. The platform also allowed participants to monitor their individual and group data showing their contribution to a particular thread and their general participation. In the first week, I demonstrated those features and led a mock activity before the seven modules started. That way, the students were encouraged to keep track of their personal engagement statistics as well as the group performance of the critical writing tasks. This also meant that the students had access to the data of their performance from the beginning of the course.
2 Participants
Fifty-four students enrolled in the class and 42 of them participated in at least 70% of the weekly classes and submitted the final assignment; thus, these were regarded as regular according to the university policy. The dropout rate (22%) was similar to the other courses in the program and, as such, this was not considered as an extraordinary rate. The majority of the group was in the second year of the ELT program. They were prospective EFL teachers who were learning English as a foreign language.
3 Data collection
For the quantitative part of this study, I followed a one-group pretest and posttest design for which I utilized the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS). It was initially developed by Fisher et al. (2001) and aimed to measure learner behaviour required to engage in self-directed learning projects. The original scale included 52 items and three factors (i.e. self-management, desire for learning, and self-control). I preferred using this scale to inform the conceptualization of self-directed learning in my research.
Şahin and Erden (2009) translated the original scale and adapted it to the Turkish language. They found the SDLRS in Turkish reliable (three subscales ranged from .79 to .87 in Cronbach’s Alpha) and confirmed the original three-factor structure of the Turkish version that included 40 items in three sub-scales. I administered this version twice to all 40 participants: once before the coursework started and once one week before the course concluded.
For EP, the central data collection methods were PEPAs. PEPAs are ‘tools to involve practitioners in the reflexive process’ (Moraes Bezerra & Miller, 2015, p. 105). These tools help practitioners use pedagogical activities to include students in the puzzle. For example, Machin (2023) used individual compositions and group discussions in which the puzzlement was about learners’ L2 selves, how they account for L2 motivation in the classroom, and how L2 motivation can be enhanced. Similarly, Consoli (2022) used introduction texts, classroom discussions, and weekly reflective reports as PEPAs in exploratory practice puzzling about student motivation in an EAP class. In my case, I devised two PEPAs in the coursework that helped me include learners in the reflexive process.
• PEPA 1: I collected exit tickets throughout the semester at the end of all seven modules. Exit tickets, a pedagogical activity that I also used in my regular practice, allowed participants to share, in writing, their learning experiences by reflecting on the module content. I also encouraged them to share their recommendations for the incoming modules. I aimed to include student voice; that is, the students had a platform to comment on the new course aspects. From the EP perspective, this slightly adapted activity allowed me to monitor the learner experience throughout the semester.
• PEPA 2: This was a group discussion in the final week of the course that focused on students’ experiences across the seven modules of the course. In this activity, I provided learners with the participation topology and contributor statistics and asked them to reflect on the data personally. Following this individual work, smaller groups reflected on their individual and group engagements with the content and on their classroom performances via discussion topologies in breakout rooms. These reports included contributor statistics for the debate topic of each module. The smaller groups then shared their thoughts in a whole group discussion. PEPA 2 was an adapted version of another protocol that I had been using: think–pair–share. But this time, I aimed to include the learners in the pedagogical meaning-making regarding the puzzlement.
Both PEPAs aimed to allow the learners to examine the learning process. More specifically, with the first PEPA, the learners reflected on their learning experience throughout the modules. Also, they engaged in a group activity with PEPA 2; the data provided by the Kialo-Edu platform of each module that inferred their engagement included debate topologies, contributor statistics and leader boards. This was not only a regular group interview or collaborative reflection activity but a systematic attempt to get the students to work on actual classroom data and help them make evidence-based sense of their learning experience.
Finally, semi-structured interviews, ranging from 22 to 27 mins, were conducted after the coursework was completed. Among the 13 learners who volunteered for the semi-structured interview, three learners were selected randomly to provide more in-depth and individual reflections on the learning experience. All qualitative data excerpts have been reported anonymously.
4 Data analysis
Having confirmed that the data were distributed normally, I ran the paired-sample t-tests across all the pretest and posttests. Similarly, the reliability analyses and the t-test were computed separately as well as the general reliability of the SDLRS. To better understand the results of the t-tests, effect sizes were also calculated.
The data that were collected through PEPAs and the interviews were analysed thematically (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The flexibility of the thematic analysis allowed me to focus on the learner experience and the classroom quality of life rather than focus merely on the self-directed learning hypothesis that was drawn in the quantitative phase. The process began with the initial coding of the qualitative data which continued iteratively. Following this process, the codes were grouped in clusters and afterwards in themes. The emerging themes on learner experiences were used to further explain the quantitative results and reveal how learners manifested their self-directed learning experiences over the course.
III Results and findings
1 Quantitative results
The SDLRS showed an overall high reliability both in the pretest (.91) and posttest (.92) (DeVellis, 2016), and each subscale was acceptably reliable (ranging from .71 to .87). Table 1 summarizes the number of items and the reliability scores.
Cronbach’s alpha score for the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS) and three subscales.
The participants’ self-directed learning readiness scores ranged from 40 to 200. For each of the 40 items, the minimum possible score was 1 and the maximum was 5. According to the paired sample t-tests, students’ self-directed learning readiness was higher in the posttest (M = 157.5, SD = 16.52) than in the pretest (M = 151.2, SD = 15.42). The mean difference was statistically significant (p = 0.001). For the three subscales, however, the results were not as straightforward.
Students’ self-management scores were worse before (M = 52.83, SD = 6.59) than after the course (M = 54.38, SD = 6.31). However, this improvement of 1.55, 95% CI [−3.28, 0.18], was not statistically significant (p = 0.077).
In terms of desire for learning, the students performed again worse before (M = 59.52, SD = 5.49) than after the EAP course (M = 62.08, SD = 7.07). However, this improvement of 2.57, 95% CI [−4.27, −0.83], was statistically significant (p = 0.005) contrary to the first subscale.
Students’ self-control scores were compared, and the results were similar to the previous sub-scale. On average, students performed worse in terms of self-control before (M = 38.9 SD = 5.76) than after the course (M = 41, SD = 6.01). This improvement of 2.1, 95% CI [−3.74, −0.66], was statistically significant (p = 0.006) as well.
According to the levels of effect size (see Table 2), the significant differences (p < .05) were in the neighborhood of .40 (ranging from .38 to .41). This indicates a medium effect, which means that the course had moderate practical significance in certain constructs of the SDLRS. Table 2 summarizes these results.
Paired samples t-test results summary.
Notes. SDLRS = Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale.
In sum, even though the learners’ scores of self-directed learning readiness were significantly higher after the course than before, these quantitative results are hardly conclusive considering the effect sizes. However, the quantitative line of research in my practice was indeed a part of the puzzle. In line with Dikilitaş and Griffith’s (2017) suggestion, these results provided an initial step for me into this practitioner research by helping me frame and problematize the notion of self-directed learning in practice.
2 Qualitative findings
Three main themes about the learner experiences and the quality of life in the EAP class emerged from the thematic analysis: (1) Learner engagement while online debating; (2) rewards and challenges of flipped and online instruction; and (3) assessment as learning for learner autonomy.
a Learner engagement while online debating
The findings revealed that the Kialo-Edu platform scaffolded learners’ engagement and afforded a ‘motivating’ learning environment albeit online.
Ayse: I was concerned about this course. I thought I would not experience a university class experience. I would not know much about my cohort. On [Kialo-Edu], there was a very intriguing discussion going on. I learned many new things about other people that I had not noticed before. This motivated me to keep visiting the discussion page to check if they replied to my argument. (Interview)
Ayse refers to Kialo-Edu assignments in which the students were required to respond to the instructor’s main argument and their peers’ responses with further arguments. The platform managed to create a digital learning community. The community engagement ‘motivated’ Ayse, which made her follow particular responses that she found ‘intriguing’. This engagement increased her desire for participation while learning more about her classmates. Similarly, another student, Burak, remarked in the interview that ‘the applications and websites were very beneficial’, for instance, Burak found that it was a ‘different experience to connect to other people and to participate in class debates on Kialo-Edu’. Overall, Burak pointed out that a ‘different experience’ was helpful to feel ‘connected’ compared to other lecture-style online courses. The level of active participation on Kialo-Edu was particularly positive for Burak.
The students’ desire for participation was also visible in the contributor statistics. Figure 2, below, shows the debate topology figure generated on the platform for each assignment. The blue dot in the middle corresponds to the main argument posted by the instructor.
Sample debate topology.
At the first level, immediately surrounding the blue dot, the green slices show pro-arguments whereas the reds are con ones. The density of the colour (from light green/red to darker ones) indicates the rating of each argument (the darker the colour of the slice is, the higher rating the response has). The second and third-level arguments correspond to further arguments to which the learners responded to their peers. This debate topology supports Ayse and Burak in that the learners responded to their peers and used rating features to engage with others. Even though the class was composed of 54 students in total, this particular assignment included 212 contributions and 130 peer ratings and the assignment was monitored 1,614 times.
The relationship between learner engagement in online learning and desire for learning was mentioned in PEPA 2 as well. The learners indicated that their desire for learning increased because the new classroom pedagogies introduced to meet the post-Covid instructional necessities provided a non-conventional but meaningful way of the learning experience as can be seen in the following excerpt.
Dilan: Honestly, I feel prepared and motivated for this class. I think it is related to what we learn and the way we learn it. This [class] is different from others. It motivates me to keep up. (PEPA 2)
In Dilan’s excerpt, the ‘different’ way of learning is highlighted as a motivating aspect that increases the desire for learning. Here, this motivating difference that Dilan implied was not particularly the same as what Burak found different in his remarks above. Here, Dilan pointed out that the engagement before the class made this course constructively ‘different’ than others.
b Rewards and challenges of flipped and online instruction
Learner engagement before the class through homework and introduction of materials, which is a typical characteristic of flipped instruction (Bergmann & Sams, 2012), was perceived as a motivator to ‘keep up’. In that sense, the flipped class was a rewarding experience for some learners. Dilan’s comments indicated that it was not only the content of the class that kept them engaged but it was a combination of content, instructional design, and pedagogies that allowed them to actively take responsibility for learning and monitoring the learning trajectories. That rewarding experience though was challenging for some students such as Burak.
Burak: The weekly agenda felt like a marathon. Before, it was like a sprint that required a lot of energy but only during the exam week. But in a marathon, you have to keep running with a stable tempo. For example, I had to review the classroom page every week before the lesson. I was not able to do this a few times, and those lessons felt very difficult. So it was like a weekly challenge that kept me on track. (Interview)
Burak’s statement showed that I had better avoid being laudatory about the flipped classroom as well since it was not the solution to all my problems. The flipped design of the instruction was certainly considered different from business-as-usual instruction. The coursework required sustained engagement and self-monitoring throughout the semester, which was something with which my learners were not familiar. Also, the learners thought that the unusual way of interacting with the course content in the flipped design was challenging but useful to keep them on track.
Emre: It is very unusual for me to do homework and read all the stuff before class, so I didn’t feel ready when I didn’t follow the schedule. (PEPA 2)
Even though Emre talks about a negative experience, it is also closely related to self-directed learning. The design of the course required the learners to take control of their learning processes throughout the semester, which is quite similar to what Burak asserted above. I realized that the concept of homework in the flipped instruction was obviously a challenge in terms of self-directed learning. Another student stated in the following excerpt: Fatma: I think there would be fewer assignments because it was hard to cope with them. It is not about feeling like doing homework. I sometimes felt lost about understanding which homework to do before the class and which one I should do after the class. (PEPA 2)
With PEPA 2, the learners had the opportunity to collaboratively examine the pros and cons of their collective experience. It showed me that the students experienced management issues in keeping track of the class assignments. I realized that they needed explicit support in terms of the coursework, the order and structure of classroom activities and the out-of-the-class assignments and readings. When I considered the quantitative results and qualitative findings together, I was able to make better sense of both; these findings might be related to the non-significant result related to the SDLRS’s self-management construct. Crucially, my students sometimes felt, as Fatma put it, ‘lost’ and needed support in managing their learning procedures. On the other hand, some students managed to find out the opportunity for them to become more efficient learners. Indeed, the flipped design required a learning curve as Burak explains: Burak: Overall, the first part [of the course] was a bit harder for me but when I better understood what was expected of me, especially about essay writing according to critical thinking strategies, it got easier as I had more information about the assignments. I enjoyed observing myself progressing to a better level as the student ends. (Interview)
Here, Burak elaborates on his experience of the learning curve. The mode of instruction as well as the activities such as Kialo-Edu debates were new for him, which constituted a steeper learning curve in the beginning. This curve became more manageable later leading him to a satisfactory feeling about his own development. The modules allowed him to orient himself into the new learning mode and self-monitor his progress, which was crucial to growing his readiness for self-directed learning.
c Assessment-as-learning for learner autonomy
New classroom pedagogies in terms of assessment promoted peer- and self-evaluation. The portfolio-based writing assessment relied heavily on an understanding of assessment-as-learning. The learners found those helpful in monitoring their critical writing skills.
Giray: I found it very pleasant and impactful to evaluate my work. It was like a control mechanism for me to detect what I had missed in my writing. I felt in charge. (PEPA 2)
Evaluating their performance served Giray as a self-control mechanism making him feel ‘in charge’. Crucially, that was the essence of the ability to regulate and direct one’s learning trajectory similar to Burak. The overall positive experience regarding assessment-as-learning also emerged in PEPA 1 as illustrated in the following:
‘When my friends responded to my argument or left a comment about it, I felt elevated, excited. It was like I needed to respond further or work on that comment’;
‘Receiving detailed feedback on my arguments was new to me because it made me feel regarded as important and gave me the opportunity to develop my writing’;
‘The rubric helped me understand what I did and did not work. It was much clearer to me that way. I also used the rubric to give feedback to my friends. I saw many good and bad examples [of writing]’.
The learners’ experience with diversified assessment strategies including self-assessment and peer-feedback was overall positive. Despite being unfamiliar with such pedagogies and finding them hard to manage at first, the learners found them beneficial as they used rubrics to self-evaluate or evaluate others’ work and receive feedback on their own work. Including students in a collective meaning-making over the pedagogy, for instance, via PEPA 1, also supported me to grow more reflective as a practitioner and see all sides of the assessment strategies that I adopted. More specifically, the three excerpts above showed me that the pedagogies which promoted peer-to-peer interaction/evaluation even asynchronously or self-evaluation could be related to self-management. Moreover, the quality of classroom life was not only about feeling ‘excited’ about new pedagogies but also about success. Students remarked how the culture of diverse feedback in the EAP writing class contributed to their academic success.
Hande: As a result of my writing to Kialo debates and the feedback I received, I think I have developed myself academically. It was useful for me to understand why I failed . . . I was able to see my friends [evaluation] and their writing, which made more sense together and helped me fix my mistakes next time. (PEPA 2)
The repetitive structure of the modules and the culture of assessment-as-learning supported Hande to learn from her mistakes. Here, the point to highlight is that she showed agency to compare the peer feedback and students’ productions amongst others. This was a strategy that she developed to regulate her learning.
The quantitative data showed inconclusive results regarding the self-management factor. EP and the interview data were helpful in gaining more multi-pronged insight but also demonstrated contradictory findings. For instance, Irem remarked in PEPA 2 that the flipped design of learning was confusing, and she occasionally needed some conventional face-to-face assistance.
Irem: I believe this class would have been much more effective if it had been face-to-face. Online tasks made it hard for me to concentrate, there were too many new things to get used to and too many things to keep in mind. (PEPA 2)
Irem’s remarks are similar to Fatma’s; both were overwhelmed in terms of managing their learning effectively. This time, however, Irem explicitly pointed out that she needed face-to-face instruction. That was unfortunately not possible due to the country’s health regulations back then. However, now that face-to-face meetings at the university are possible again, it seems that the learners may need occasional face-to-face support to manage their learning trajectories more effectively even in fully online instruction. Nevertheless, the new sequence of learning processes initiated by the flipped design supported some learners in terms of getting them prepared for the course content before the class meetings.
Excerpt 4. I was working on my homework before the class, and we were working on it during the class while learning about academic writing topics. My homework was in a way a preparation for the class. (PEPA 1)
According to excerpt 4, using some of the course content as homework before the class was a supportive practice of the EAP course. A different student elaborated on this as follows: Ceren: This class was online along with other courses I took this semester. That was challenging. I was not even in [University city]. This made me feel alone from time to time. I mean it was hard to manage my time and keep up with all the content. We used [Kialo] regularly but it was difficult to get organized. (Interview)
Unlike self-control, which is more about having a say in instructional choices, content, and one’s learning endeavors, self-management is more about building up learning strategies related to time management, organization, and systematicity. As Ceren asserted, ‘the new normal’ was ‘challenging’ for her in terms of self-management. She had difficulties in terms of time management and getting ‘organized’ throughout the semester. Therefore, my learners’ experiences helped me recognize diverse needs in my online and flipped instruction and showed me that interventions might also be needed not only for the learners’ well-being but also for helping them build up skills and strategies so that they can feel ready to self-direct their learning.
IV Discussion
Overall, my first experience of EP, during which I puzzled over adopting pedagogies that might help my learners stay on track in an engaging online education experience, yielded three points. First, the results showed that the EAP course’s flipped design enabled the learners to develop their learner autonomy since they were readier for self-directed learning after the course than before when they were given control over their online engagement. This is supported by Lewis and Vialleton (2011) in that language learners’ awareness and control over the instructional choices help them self-regulate their learning. Similarly, Biçer’s (2018) and Salvi’s (2017) studies also demonstrated that when given opportunities to self-monitor, learners as co-researchers in EP felt more motivated and engaged.
Second, it was possible to inform my engagement in classroom-based research and draw certain conclusions from the quantitative methods, but the quantitative results made sense to me, as a teacher, only when they were reflexively combined with the qualitative classroom-based data. Therefore, I depended on the data that included learners in the collective meaning-making of the pedagogy overall through PEPAs and interviews. Learners’ involvement provided me with a clearer understanding of the concept of self-directedness. Also, learner involvement was the key to my understanding because their involvement allowed us to engage in pedagogical meaning-making and knowledging together about academic concepts such as self-directed learning.
Third, this study aligns with the earlier findings on the positive relationship between attitude towards technology and self-directed learning. Similar to Pan’s (2020) study, the learners in this study regarded technology-enhanced communication via Kialo-Edu tasks and classroom interaction through peer-feedback as motivating and engaging factors, and the learners asserted that they improved their desire for learning. The findings gave an insight into how self-directedness is related to affective factors such as motivation, desire, and enjoyment. Contrary to an earlier study by Dyck (1986), my findings did not indicate any anxiety-provoking aspect of the self-directed learning project although some learners reported that they felt overwhelmed at the beginning of the coursework. Relatedly, classroom practices such as diversifying feedback strategies and sources such as assessment for learning, assessment as learning, portfolio assessment (as in Lam, 2018; Lee & Coniam, 2013), and providing the opportunity to use this feedback on students’ writing performance influenced the learners’ motivation and engagement levels.
I would also like to discuss the experience of engaging in EP itself. Crucially, the design, the platform, and the tasks/assignments were selected and facilitated by me. This was, I realized, rather problematic since I originally intended my research to follow EP. I noticed that I could have opened this space of instructional decisions to my students more radically than I did. However, the students evidently used those practices to keep themselves on track. There were also students who struggled to keep up, and they were able to report it contextually as did Ceren in her interview and Fatma in PEPA 2 as part of their reflection on their learning experience. This experience indicated that both teachers and students puzzled over their learning, but puzzling can become more potent to inform classroom practices when this is done more systematically through research and together with the students through EP.
Overall, this experience demonstrated the importance of investigating pedagogic practices to develop ‘quality of life’ (Allwright, 2003, p. 128) in an online language classroom. EP introduced a new perspective to me: keeping in mind the quality of life in my classroom, brick-and-mortar or virtual while developing my practice. This experience, in particular, highlighted that my students’ readiness for self-directed learning is a critical skill for them to face up to the instructional changes following the supernova. Thus, creating a learning space that allows for opportunities to increase students’ self-directedness is critical. Unfamiliarity with the new online learning mode constituted challenges for my students’ self-management; the new norm requires them to shoulder the online classroom responsibilities (Gacs et al., 2020). Over time, they found it difficult to stay on track in terms of time management, modular learning, and keeping up with the coursework and assignments in an organized way. As for self-management, our exploration does not provide clear positive results in terms of the quality in our class. However, the challenge itself underscores the importance of the teacher as the designer of the learning space.
This EP investigation was helpful for me to feel more like a holistic practitioner (McKinley, 2019). However, similarly to Slimani-Rolls and Kiely’s (2019, p. 189) participating teachers, I also felt some tension throughout my practice when focusing on my experience and, at the same time, on the learning goals of the EAP course. Time felt so limited to fulfil the requirements of the teaching duty as well as the research. Focusing too much on EP sometimes brought up an ethical dilemma for me as a teacher; how could I create a clear balance? While puzzling about my puzzles, I realized that PEPAs could help me integrate research and teaching. Accordingly, PEPA 1, exit tickets, served as assessment-for-learning activities that provided data, not only for the research but also for instructional purposes in understanding my learners’ progress. PEPA 2, think-pair-share, served as a reflection activity for learners to elaborate on what they did and did not do throughout the learning process that may or may not have served them.
I would like to highlight three opportunities for me to include my students more radically as co-researchers. I realized those opportunities only after the process of my practitioner research was concluded. I would like to share these as notes-to-self and also for practitioners engaging in EP in the future. I would share the first round of survey results with the learners. This could have helped me to better integrate the quantitative and qualitative data since the learners could also have been included in that process. In my case, it was only me who had access to SDLRS results, and I felt that this was limiting when I had to make sense of the findings under my practitioner hat. Second, I would show how I used PEPA 1 to make sense of the ongoing quality of classroom life and report back to students briefly that their analyses mattered and were important for me to revise and adapt my pedagogies. Finally, I would increase the use of PEPA2 throughout the module and ask learners to engage with their contributor statistics, personally and in groups, several times instead of merely at the end of the semester. This would allow me to promote the role of the learners more radically as co-researchers and their continuous involvement in the process of knowledging together.
These bring me back to my teacher educator hat. Since the learners were prospective language teachers, I intended this experience to set an example for them regarding how valuable the student voice is to grow as reflective practitioners (Uştuk, 2022, 2023). During the revisions of this article, two learners, who were among the participants, were awarded a national grant that allowed them to conduct their own EP about the issues that they had been puzzling over in their senior year. I am happy if that experience has encouraged them in any way to work with learners to explore and better understand their own practice.
V Conclusions
The experience presented in this article demonstrated to me that the flipped and modular instruction, different forms of feedback, and reconceptualizing assessment as a reflective learning experience have increased the learners’ desire for learning and supported their self-control skills. The unfamiliarity with the new learning modes though constituted challenges in terms of self-management. Several implications can be drawn from this study. When scaffolded by web-based platforms that promote learner engagement and interaction, learners may increase their self-directed learning readiness. However, teachers need to be mindful of the increasing responsibility that the learners need to take and the technical and instructional complexities and unfamiliar situations that they experience. Thus, technical assistance and psychological mentorship can help learners adapt to the increased need for learner autonomy and develop the classroom quality of life further.
Allwright’s (2003) remarked that EP is a joint ‘enterprise’ (p. 138). It is an enterprise that requires all parties of this inclusive form of inquiry to take responsibility for understanding the classroom quality of life and develop it. In my context, it was difficult to position students as co-researchers because student inclusion in instructional decisions is not a norm, or at least, it was challenging for me to identify opportunities for learner inclusivity more radically into my puzzling. Now it feels clearer to me, after my first engagement in EP, that the process can provide me with means to challenge traditional norms about students’ positions in the classroom.
