How do we overcome teacher resistance to new literacy instruction training? That’s the topic of doctoral student Elizabeth Cutrer’s doctoral dissertation research and of her entry into Carolina’s first “Three Minute Thesis” competition.
Cutrer was one of ten students across the Carolina campus selected for the final round of the competition. Cutrer’s presentation was entitled “’Gettin’ what I’ve always got:’ A multi-domain literacy coaching approach to support teachers resistant to change.”
The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is an academic competition that helps graduate students foster effective presentation and communication skills. Participants are given just three minutes to explain the breadth and significance of their research project to a non-specialist audience.
3MT was developed by The University of Queensland in 2008, and is now held in more than 200 universities in 18-plus countries around the world.
Cutrer’s research drew from her work with Lynne Vernon-Feagans on the Targeted Reading Intervention program, in which trained coaches work with teachers one-to-one over webcam remote connections to build the teachers’ capacity in reading instruction. Cutrer used data collected through TRI to evaluate the effectiveness of combining coaching approaches.
Carolina’s final competition was held Nov. 4 and was won by Nick Wagner, a doctoral student in psychology who also worked with Vernon-Feagans and based his presentation on data derived from Vernon-Feagans’s Family Life Project. Wagner will go on to compete in regional 3MT competition.