Having taken a full 2 weeks off of my AR due to school scheduling conflicts (Biofuel Day, Science Fair, Career Day, ISE Day, Veterans Day, etc), because I do NOT want anything to influence my data, I now have a new, potentially fatal obstacle. The 15-20 minutes EACH DAY that students could expect to work on their prompts, has been gobbled up by RTI. Now, I am introducing my prompts in the morning in the 0-5 minutes after the bell rings and before the planning teachers (gym, music, etc) come to get them. There will be no more time for my students to work on their writing in class. Just like that.
The great "yardstick" of my research is the length of their writing. If they enjoy their prompt, they will write more than if they are just trying to get the assignment finished. Now, if they write, they must do it at home. This mode is entirely different from the first 2/3 of my research. I am pretty frustrasted by that.
Please advise.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
AR Phase II
The second phase of my action research is this: students are shown an interesting picture and must write a story that passes through the photo at some point. I found it was helpful to explain the assignment as such: "Imagine that you are watching a movie. At some point- beginning, middle, or end- the movie is paused. Tell me what the movie is about." This seemed to click with the students.
The first image is from a calendar called Nuns Having Fun, and features a nun in sneakers dancing in front of a mural of ballerinas. The second is an image of a woman in dress attire crying; her mascara running down her face, and the third is a surreal image of a horse dressed in a raincoat (panic on his/her face) aboard a ship- holding a cat.....
A couple notes about the implementation of my AR:
First, I skipped a week. A shortened week containing Career Day & BioFuel Day threatened to rob the students of valuable work time, thus skewing my data. I decided to put a one week freeze on the proceedings. We picked back up last wee.
Secondly, I am absolutely buried in data. Turns out, my AR is quite time-consuming. I would rather not somehow choose a smaller sample size. I prefer to have a large sample so that I can make a more definite statement (one way or the other) about my data. I would have to narrow the field to 5 or so in order to have a chance at compiling data as I go. Instead, I am shoveling everything into folders that I will then pick through over Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks.
Some notes about student participation:
So far, interest has been parabolic. Participation started out fairly high. I believe that by briefing them about my research (I had to explain why we were about to embark on this 9 week writing odyssey in which participation was essentially volunteer-based and nothing would be graded) I might have unintentionally created a high level of participation. There was some initial excitement just to be doing something new. Over the next few weeks, participation waned. I had to extend deadlines. Some never turned their writing in. I decided that if students are not engaged enough to even complete a writing, perhaps that is a valid measure of the relative intrinsic motivation inherent in the prompt. So, that's okay. Absences also play a part. There are students who have missed weeks at a time. Some are absent Monday and Tuesday. By the time they come back they have accumulated so much make-up work, it is difficult to say if they wrote 2 sentences because they were not engaged, or if they are simply just trying to get everything done! I guess that's just how it goes doing research in the classroom.
As we have progressed into the image prompt parts of the process, participation has been on the rise! There are less "submission problems" because students begin feverishly working on these stories that pop into their heads. Thus, they often finish them Monday or Tuesday of the week. The only participation problems seem to be related to disorganization (they lose their work), perfection (they have not been able to type their submissions that they are so proud of), or absence (they are out sick). That would seem to be an early indicator of their relative motivation.
As for the quality of their work, I'll say this. They are getting considerably more "free". At first, the majority of their submissions were horribly predictable. They simply did not understand the concept of creating fiction. I felt like I was freeing a cage full of rabbits. I stood there saying "Run! You are free!" and they just stared at me, thinking "run where?” I would say: write whatever you want. Say whatever you want to say. Write until you have told your story, then stop. They would come back with a thousand questions about how much they should write; would it be okay to write this or that....
Not so, anymore. I always read their selections and narrow them down to the best 5 or 6 to re-read. From there I choose 3 that I read in front of the class. I allow the authors to identify themselves if they wish. Lately, I have had a pile of 13 or 14 that I re-read. Last week I had to expand the readings to include 2 honorable mentions. There were simply too many good works to ignore all but three.
This would also seem to be an early indicator that by designing prompts to allow for more choice might be an effective way of increasing motivation. We'll see...
The first image is from a calendar called Nuns Having Fun, and features a nun in sneakers dancing in front of a mural of ballerinas. The second is an image of a woman in dress attire crying; her mascara running down her face, and the third is a surreal image of a horse dressed in a raincoat (panic on his/her face) aboard a ship- holding a cat.....
A couple notes about the implementation of my AR:
First, I skipped a week. A shortened week containing Career Day & BioFuel Day threatened to rob the students of valuable work time, thus skewing my data. I decided to put a one week freeze on the proceedings. We picked back up last wee.
Secondly, I am absolutely buried in data. Turns out, my AR is quite time-consuming. I would rather not somehow choose a smaller sample size. I prefer to have a large sample so that I can make a more definite statement (one way or the other) about my data. I would have to narrow the field to 5 or so in order to have a chance at compiling data as I go. Instead, I am shoveling everything into folders that I will then pick through over Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks.
Some notes about student participation:
So far, interest has been parabolic. Participation started out fairly high. I believe that by briefing them about my research (I had to explain why we were about to embark on this 9 week writing odyssey in which participation was essentially volunteer-based and nothing would be graded) I might have unintentionally created a high level of participation. There was some initial excitement just to be doing something new. Over the next few weeks, participation waned. I had to extend deadlines. Some never turned their writing in. I decided that if students are not engaged enough to even complete a writing, perhaps that is a valid measure of the relative intrinsic motivation inherent in the prompt. So, that's okay. Absences also play a part. There are students who have missed weeks at a time. Some are absent Monday and Tuesday. By the time they come back they have accumulated so much make-up work, it is difficult to say if they wrote 2 sentences because they were not engaged, or if they are simply just trying to get everything done! I guess that's just how it goes doing research in the classroom.
As we have progressed into the image prompt parts of the process, participation has been on the rise! There are less "submission problems" because students begin feverishly working on these stories that pop into their heads. Thus, they often finish them Monday or Tuesday of the week. The only participation problems seem to be related to disorganization (they lose their work), perfection (they have not been able to type their submissions that they are so proud of), or absence (they are out sick). That would seem to be an early indicator of their relative motivation.
As for the quality of their work, I'll say this. They are getting considerably more "free". At first, the majority of their submissions were horribly predictable. They simply did not understand the concept of creating fiction. I felt like I was freeing a cage full of rabbits. I stood there saying "Run! You are free!" and they just stared at me, thinking "run where?” I would say: write whatever you want. Say whatever you want to say. Write until you have told your story, then stop. They would come back with a thousand questions about how much they should write; would it be okay to write this or that....
Not so, anymore. I always read their selections and narrow them down to the best 5 or 6 to re-read. From there I choose 3 that I read in front of the class. I allow the authors to identify themselves if they wish. Lately, I have had a pile of 13 or 14 that I re-read. Last week I had to expand the readings to include 2 honorable mentions. There were simply too many good works to ignore all but three.
This would also seem to be an early indicator that by designing prompts to allow for more choice might be an effective way of increasing motivation. We'll see...
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
AR Implementation Phase 1
Alright. It has begun. I was very excited to finally be standing in front of my 5th grade class explaining to them that we would be embarking on this exercise that was 2+ years in the making! Without giving any indication of what types of things I would be looking at, I implored the class to take the process seriously. I asked that they simply write whatever they were compelled to write. I explained that there was no grade involved and that I had designed the course to be as beneficial to them as it will be to me. Then, with a grin, I gave them their first prompt: "What I would do if I were principal at Johnson Elementary".
Now, I had actually intended for this first prompt to be rather vanilla. I assumed that this is a prompt that they had received before. I remember being given prompts similar to this one (substitute "teacher" or "president") annually when I was coming through elementary school. So, I was very surprised when my reading of the prompt was greeted with an excited ruckus! I got the feeling that many of them had never considered what they might do differently if they were principal. They got to writing.
My students were (and will be from here out) given their prompt Monday afternoon after lunch. They will have somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes that day to get started. They will then be allowed to pull their writing out and work on anytime they finish an assignment early (which should be frequently for most). Each afternoon, from 2:00 to 2:30, we conduct a quick spelling exercise. Unless students are really dragging their feet, this should give each student another 15-20 minutes to work on their prompt daily. Then, of course, they are allowed (encouraged) to take their writing home to work on. I encourage students to write on a word processor for this assignment since I am most concerned with how much they write.
For the first week, I did not allow students to turn their papers in early. "Friday is the due date", I told them. I really wanted them to have their papers so that if they thought of something they might actually take the paper out and add to it. However, a few students had some issues turning their papers in on Friday. I believe that in a couple of these cases the students had simply written all that they were going to write on Monday or Tuesday, and I have now expected them to carry the paper around all week without losing it. Well, as I recall from that age, once a paper is finished, it becomes a dead document that is asking to become misplaced. So, beginning this week, I will set a basket on my desk and allow them to turn their work in starting Wednesday. I no longer believe that they will be inclined to work on them simply by virtue of having them.
On Friday, they turned their papers in (most of them). I began picking through these papers for the things that I have decided might be good indicators of their relative level of engagement and (gulp) counting the number of words that each student produced. What I found is that my research is much more labor intensive than I realized. First, some of their work is quite long. One girl wrote over 300 words. Also, I found that I had some decisions to make about what I will accept as a descriptive word. For instance, if a student wrote "there would be a large, noisy room for..." then there are obviously 2 descriptive words that are a product of the student’s decision to add description to their work. Alternately, if a student wrote "I would call for cleaner restrooms.", 'cleaner restrooms' is really just a noun, in the sense that the school already has restrooms, so the sentence does not make sense without the word "cleaner". "Cleaner restrooms" is not, in this case, extraneous at all.
Then there are issues of clause, which I considered- when designing my research- to be some measure of sentence complexity, which I considered to be some measure of quality, which I considered to be some measure of engagement... Ignoring the fact that in 5th grade writing there is rarely anything approaching a subjective clause; I'm not even sure, as I sit here today, that this is any indicator at all. Should I consider keeping track of something more elementary (pun intended), such as prepositions?
Data aside, I will say this about my first week of AR: I thoroughly enjoyed getting the students writing. This is really the reason that I designed my AR to be a writing exercise. I love to read student creative writing. A handful of them are fantastic creative brains! Identifying the ones who produce inspired work even when the prompts are meant to be only average in their ability to inspire is thrilling!
I'll end this blog with a passage from one of the works:
"We would have a classroom filled with water. The class pets would be squids, octopuses, fish, and dolphins.... There would be a building with a giant chocolate fountain with strawberries and you could dip the strawberries in the chocolate fountain. We would have a big water park called Eagle's Splash World."
Now, I had actually intended for this first prompt to be rather vanilla. I assumed that this is a prompt that they had received before. I remember being given prompts similar to this one (substitute "teacher" or "president") annually when I was coming through elementary school. So, I was very surprised when my reading of the prompt was greeted with an excited ruckus! I got the feeling that many of them had never considered what they might do differently if they were principal. They got to writing.
My students were (and will be from here out) given their prompt Monday afternoon after lunch. They will have somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes that day to get started. They will then be allowed to pull their writing out and work on anytime they finish an assignment early (which should be frequently for most). Each afternoon, from 2:00 to 2:30, we conduct a quick spelling exercise. Unless students are really dragging their feet, this should give each student another 15-20 minutes to work on their prompt daily. Then, of course, they are allowed (encouraged) to take their writing home to work on. I encourage students to write on a word processor for this assignment since I am most concerned with how much they write.
For the first week, I did not allow students to turn their papers in early. "Friday is the due date", I told them. I really wanted them to have their papers so that if they thought of something they might actually take the paper out and add to it. However, a few students had some issues turning their papers in on Friday. I believe that in a couple of these cases the students had simply written all that they were going to write on Monday or Tuesday, and I have now expected them to carry the paper around all week without losing it. Well, as I recall from that age, once a paper is finished, it becomes a dead document that is asking to become misplaced. So, beginning this week, I will set a basket on my desk and allow them to turn their work in starting Wednesday. I no longer believe that they will be inclined to work on them simply by virtue of having them.
On Friday, they turned their papers in (most of them). I began picking through these papers for the things that I have decided might be good indicators of their relative level of engagement and (gulp) counting the number of words that each student produced. What I found is that my research is much more labor intensive than I realized. First, some of their work is quite long. One girl wrote over 300 words. Also, I found that I had some decisions to make about what I will accept as a descriptive word. For instance, if a student wrote "there would be a large, noisy room for..." then there are obviously 2 descriptive words that are a product of the student’s decision to add description to their work. Alternately, if a student wrote "I would call for cleaner restrooms.", 'cleaner restrooms' is really just a noun, in the sense that the school already has restrooms, so the sentence does not make sense without the word "cleaner". "Cleaner restrooms" is not, in this case, extraneous at all.
Then there are issues of clause, which I considered- when designing my research- to be some measure of sentence complexity, which I considered to be some measure of quality, which I considered to be some measure of engagement... Ignoring the fact that in 5th grade writing there is rarely anything approaching a subjective clause; I'm not even sure, as I sit here today, that this is any indicator at all. Should I consider keeping track of something more elementary (pun intended), such as prepositions?
Data aside, I will say this about my first week of AR: I thoroughly enjoyed getting the students writing. This is really the reason that I designed my AR to be a writing exercise. I love to read student creative writing. A handful of them are fantastic creative brains! Identifying the ones who produce inspired work even when the prompts are meant to be only average in their ability to inspire is thrilling!
I'll end this blog with a passage from one of the works:
"We would have a classroom filled with water. The class pets would be squids, octopuses, fish, and dolphins.... There would be a building with a giant chocolate fountain with strawberries and you could dip the strawberries in the chocolate fountain. We would have a big water park called Eagle's Splash World."
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Lesson Reflections
I just thought I'd take a moment and blog about a really awkward lesson that I taught today. As I may or may not have mentioned in an earlier post, I am stationed in a departmentalized 5th grade classroom. We (my mentor teacher and I) are responsible for Science and Health. As you might imagine, the first unit in the Science course deals primarily with the scientific method. Today I was asked to teach the second and fourth period lesson on inquiry and experimentation. The first class went alright. The students took turns reading fom the chapter and I acted as "interpreter" by relating the fundaments as they are set forth to a "real world" example (in this case, a parachute egg drop). Ok. There was a worksheet to follow, and as I had not read the worksheet, I had failed to adequately emphasize the parts of the chapter that were to be on the worksheet. The students (and I) struggled to make sense of it, given my presentation.
Before the I was to teach the fourth period, Mrs. Pratt and I discussed an idea for making the lesson presentation match up to the worksheet. She suggested having the students stop their reading at each vocabulary word, at which point we would list the vocabulary in front of the class and discuss its relation to the larger subcategories from the worksheet "Inquiry Tools" and "Experimentation". (Of which "Experimentation" is an "Inquiry Tool" and "experiment" is a component of "Experimentation") Suffice to say, my brain is not organized the same way as the text is. That's why I taught the first class the way I did. I would let them read through a page or two of text before I would jump in an make sense of the whole lot as it exists in what I believe to be a more sequential and rational order.
In the second class, I was just trying to "go with" the book as they has laid it out. In doing so, I was stressing points that made little sense to me, in the order that they appear in the book, taking the emphasis off of the natural progression of scientific inquiry as I understand it. For example "Think about ways in which objects relate to one another. Figure out the order in which things happen" is presented as the final component of "Experimentation" on the worksheet.
Another reason the lesson was awkward, I believe, was that the lesson became too compartmentalized. There are around 20 vocabulary words that I needed to stop and elaborate on during the presentation. I could not get these 20 peices to be puzzle pieces of one coherent picture. I think the kids just saw vaguely related ingredients.
Also, I was trying to squeeze the things from my first lesson (examples and such) that I knew had worked into my second lesson. The dynamic of the second lesson was changed entirely, therefore the examples didn't ring like they did the first time around.
I guess, in the end, I just made the mistake of trying to teach to a worksheet that I didn't create. I couldn't seem to reconcile the book, the worksheet, and my own scientific brain... not on the fly, anyway. AND, to top it all off, the Special Ed. teacher was in the room with a student for the first time observing my teaching for this lesson. She probably thinks I'm a fool.
Before the I was to teach the fourth period, Mrs. Pratt and I discussed an idea for making the lesson presentation match up to the worksheet. She suggested having the students stop their reading at each vocabulary word, at which point we would list the vocabulary in front of the class and discuss its relation to the larger subcategories from the worksheet "Inquiry Tools" and "Experimentation". (Of which "Experimentation" is an "Inquiry Tool" and "experiment" is a component of "Experimentation") Suffice to say, my brain is not organized the same way as the text is. That's why I taught the first class the way I did. I would let them read through a page or two of text before I would jump in an make sense of the whole lot as it exists in what I believe to be a more sequential and rational order.
In the second class, I was just trying to "go with" the book as they has laid it out. In doing so, I was stressing points that made little sense to me, in the order that they appear in the book, taking the emphasis off of the natural progression of scientific inquiry as I understand it. For example "Think about ways in which objects relate to one another. Figure out the order in which things happen" is presented as the final component of "Experimentation" on the worksheet.
Another reason the lesson was awkward, I believe, was that the lesson became too compartmentalized. There are around 20 vocabulary words that I needed to stop and elaborate on during the presentation. I could not get these 20 peices to be puzzle pieces of one coherent picture. I think the kids just saw vaguely related ingredients.
Also, I was trying to squeeze the things from my first lesson (examples and such) that I knew had worked into my second lesson. The dynamic of the second lesson was changed entirely, therefore the examples didn't ring like they did the first time around.
I guess, in the end, I just made the mistake of trying to teach to a worksheet that I didn't create. I couldn't seem to reconcile the book, the worksheet, and my own scientific brain... not on the fly, anyway. AND, to top it all off, the Special Ed. teacher was in the room with a student for the first time observing my teaching for this lesson. She probably thinks I'm a fool.
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