Well, here we are, down to the last weeks of writing our research paper. At the beginning of this semester, for some reason I was under the impression that I would be writing this paper over the course of the entire school year. I thought, "One research paper? No problem" and I sauntered along. Now I'm trying to be "The Little Engine that Could" and chug my way up and over this hill. Last week I thought I would wipe out my research paper to do list, but mainly I fiddled with data. I wanted to get a clear picture of what the data showed so that I could implement my second action research cycle more successfully than the first. And that action research cycle began today.
During the break I transcribed student interview responses and then counted up academic vocabulary terms in the pre and post interviews. I made separate spreadsheet tabs for tutor responses and learner responses and then counted those up. I also counted words per student in pre and post tests to see if overall, students were speaking more by the end of peer teaching implementation. While there was an increase in academic vocabulary and word count for both tutors and learners, it is not as dramatic as I had hoped. But I used this information to make some inferences about how I was teaching and if I was even giving them the terminology I wanted them to use. Perhaps this is influencing my study too much but for the second cycle I would like to be a little more explicit in how I teach math terms and academic vocabulary. The more I mention something, the more students prioritize it. Included in my preparation for action research cycle 2 was the preparation of a unit pre/post test. The pre/post test on unit topics that I administered to measure academic growth during the first action research cycle was recommended by the curriculum but was WAY too easy which made measuring growth difficult. Apart from that, I lost over half the responses to the post-test when students switched teachers as hybrid teaching began. This time, I hope to have crafted a more reliable measurement tool that focuses on what I will actually be teaching during these next few weeks. Now the question is, how do I write a more substantial literature review, add my second cycle of data that ends in two weeks along with an analysis of its results, and polish my research paper for submission all within the next three weeks? "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..."
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Listening to Zaretta Hammond's presentation on culturally responsive teaching entitled, "Inequity by Design" gave me something to chew on this week. By the title, some might think that culturally responsive teaching is about multicultural awareness but this is its own category. Culturally responsive teaching focuses on improving all students' information processing skills which open the door to related areas such as multicultural awareness and forming a community of learners. I loved Hammond's quote by Lev Vygotsky that "children grow into the intellectual life around them." Educators need to set up their students to access a positive intellectual environment, slowly changing any derogatory narratives they tell themselves. Another important point she made is that teachers don't necessarily need to add more rigor to their curriculum but need to prepare their students with skills that will help them succeed through the rigor. The key ingredient here is TRUST. Setting up a foundation of trust with students enables the teacher to push students to heights not possible before. In thinking about my own students, I think about what hard work it was to create that foundational trust with my students online this year. However, I later asked them to do many cognitively difficult things and they rose to the task. Zaretta Hammond mentions a few cultural learning tools to improve processing skills. These are puzzles and patterns, memory (d = 0.67), talk and wordplay (d = 0.82), and perspectives (d = 0.85). I have experienced great success in working with repeated activities with slight variation to improve student academic performance as well as confidence. Because of repetition, students today are doing things that we would have thought impossible before such as logging on to a daily Zoom call and using Zoom tools, navigating and utilizing a daily practice app homepage, and using online multiple modalities such as drawing, photo, and voice recording tools to show learning. Along with repetition, I have found that the majority of my class has benefited from having the chance to work on assignments with a peer, seeing and hearing their perspective. Some students who were not even logging in to their assignment portal were now working with a partner to complete that process along with the academic exercise. Especially some strugglers learned a multitude of skills that I wouldn't have been able to see if students hadn't worked in pairs. These include saving assignments correctly, changing the size of text boxes, etc. that previously were barriers to them even though I had modeled to the whole class countless times. Students also seemed to just be enjoying the learning process more with a partner. After the first or second day trying out assignment work with a partner, I had one student who had been struggling shout "I love school!" The technology I thought would be a barrier (screen sharing in Zoom breakout rooms) now became a tool that forced partners to use their words to talk each other through assignments instead of having partners copy or worse, do the work for their partners. My hope is to keep experimenting with more culturally responsive practices to create better connections of trust and bring my students to new levels of learning. After spending a day swishing through various youtube videos and Google searches on how to organize and represent data from a Google Form, I only ended up with more questions. What's the best way to organize my pre and post test data in one spreadsheet? What is a pivot table and how do I get specific numbers from a Likert scale in there? Most importantly, why is statistics a required general ed. class in college and not a class on using a spreadsheet properly? In desperation I reached out to a friend who works in data analysis. With a few lightening fast clicks by my friend, I had a host of consolidated information at my fingertips that could be represented in any number of graphs. I was pleased to learn that in 8 of 10 questions I asked in my Google Form, students grew in their self-assessment of collaborative and problem solving skills. Unfortunately I have a couple students who slipped past me without taking the pre-test which means that I have to exclude them from my study altogether. It is so difficult to catch all the kids' submissions or lack thereof during virtual teaching. I could see from responses that kids didn't tie a couple of my questions to what they had been experiencing in the previous two weeks so I think I will take these questions out of my next cycle of research. I believe these self-assessment questions (I listen to my peers, I ask my peers for help, I give suggestions of how my peers can improve, etc.) will help me answer my research questions: What interpersonal skills do successful students demonstrate when peer teaching? What are the benefits of peer teaching to the learners? What are the benefits of peer teaching to the teachers? Although my research involves mixed methods of data collection, my aim is to have as much quantitative data as possible. During virtual learning, our math unit assessments are much simpler than before, making it difficult to measure student growth. I used one of these assessments in this first round of research but after seeing most students ace it from the beginning I think I will change this measurement tool. I decided this time, that I need to develop my own assessment, planning to assess lessons covered in the specific time frame in which I plan to implement peer teaching. I will still have qualitative academic data from the STAR Math test, but it covers such a wide array of skills that students may not exhibit much growth in two weeks. I do have some qualitative data in daily recorded student answers to pre-recorded interview questions in Seesaw. After the fiasco of loosing all my students and their prior work submissions, I managed to find their first and last interview submissions in Seesaw from the peer teaching research cycle. I recorded the audio on Zoom and now it's a matter of transcribing their responses side by side in a table to look for growth in academic vocabulary which is a focus of my last research question: Does academic vocabulary increase over time with peer teaching? |
Minna NummelinLife-long learner and dual language 2nd grade teacher. Archives
April 2021
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