My journey in search of a research topic feels like a twisty mountain road. I began with the idea to research the balance and efficacy of technology use in primary grades. With an indefinite end to virtual teaching, I decided this would be hard to experiment with. I moved on to looking into efficient formative assessment and feedback. I was really inspired when I watched a video about a high school teacher who had his students self-assess in mathematics while in teams. They would then work in their team to fill in the information gaps for each team member to be ready for their next assessment. I have always held in high regards a self-run classroom. After collaborating with Dr. Redmond and Susan Craig, I decided on researching peer-teaching during these unusual pandemic circumstances. During virtual teaching, it is easier than ever to talk the entire precious time available to meet with students over Zoom. There is so much pressure to cover all the bases but it's important for teachers to remember, even in these circumstances, to stop talking and let the kids start doing. Apart from that, kids have been isolated from their peers. By researching peer-teaching, I could hand the learning baton to students and measure the effects of what I hypothesized would be a much needed opportunity to connect with and learn from their peers. When I think about my future path beyond this masters program, I have many question marks. I think my research findings provide hope to teachers that student collaboration is possible even in the primary grades in the midst of virtual teaching. Perhaps at some point I will get even more specific with my findings on what adds to the most effective peer-teaching practices. I see more research needing to be done because of the disparities between my first research cycle and my second. Perhaps I could use my research in a coaching position at some point but certainly it informs and improves my current teaching practices.
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For this week's homework, we looked through some websites of graduates of the Innovative Learning Masters program. We were specifically analyzing their direction toward an audience and how effective it is. I looked more in depth at a website focused on using technology for individualized goal setting in elementary school. I thought that the author made it clear from the home page that what she had tried out was certainly doable in any classroom. With this kind of statement, it seemed to me she was addressing teachers. Her list of resources were lessons, assessments, and a list of technological tools she recommends, also leading me to think that she is aiming her research outcomes towards benefitting teachers. What I enjoyed the most about her website were the large visuals. On some of the pages, text was broken up into sections and demarcated by separate alternating color backgrounds and symbols that all had a similar theme...This might be a tangent I should save for my 703 class on transliteracy. When I shift my thoughts on audience towards my own research, I mainly think about how my findings might be beneficial to teachers even though of course I'd want any administrators or parents to gain from it anything they could. Teachers have direct contact with multiple students, a scenario perfect for implementing peer-teaching in mathematics or any subject. Keeping teachers in mind, I need to mull over what kind of wording, organization, steps, and resources would make it easiest for them to gain the truest picture of what I was able to accomplish and am excited about. I enjoy websites where the tabs or headers match the content. If the page is indicating resources and how-tos, I want to see a clear sequenced list of steps and resources with links. If I want the back story, I'll go to the About the Author section. Mainly, I want the teacher-reader to step away from my website, with a new idea or tool they're looking forward to trying out again in a new light or for the very first time. What an interesting assignment. This week we were asked to sketch our action research journey. It was interesting to think over the successes and failures...although in a learning journey they should all be considered learning moments no matter the outcome. I have learned quite a bit so far and now I'm learning even more about transliteracy and the power of sketching as a tool for learning. I took a class on European politics in Spain a few years ago...while you might think it must have been the most dry and boring class ever, it ended up being one of my favorite classes. Ok, yes I find politics interesting, but that's not why I loved the class. I loved the class because of the professor and his teaching style. Each day, he told the story of politics with drawings. We were spell-bound as he drew out our own three branches of government and made comparisons between the U.S. balance of power system and how it is viewed in Europe. If he had only lectured, there is no way I could have followed all the way through his classes, but with the drawings he made right in front of us, I found myself on a journey right through the European Union political system.
I noticed in my own teaching, how engagement increases when I stop screen sharing and have kids get out their whiteboards and follow along with me in a little writing or drawing exercise. It's better for too because I can just change my video output to my document camera and tell them to pin my video while I keep watching all of them at once...which is virtually what another screen would help me do too. In the past, I've also watched the power of the GLAD pictorial work on students. The idea is to draw a large poster of your topic in front of them, not share a finished product. I've noticed that student engagement is very high at this time. I can see the importance of including more sketching in my lessons, especially now during virtual learning. There is so little time with students and their screen attention is limited. So why not get them involved in sketching what they are learning? I think this is especially helpful for the little guys who struggle with writing, especially quick note taking. I always thought definition writing defeated the purpose of learning new words for primary aged students. I'm excited to try more of this in my classroom. Take a look at my first sketch research story. I have been wrapping up all the data from research cycle two and in the last 48 hours have been squishing and squashing them and comparing it to my first research cycle data. Truthfully, it was a great disappointment to see that my second cycle of research yielded less significant results than the first regarding the implementation of peer-teaching in second grade math. My results showed that most students enjoyed and preferred peer-teaching to working on their own. Academic growth was not significant on a standardized test in either cycle but was significant on a unit/skills specific math test. Cycle one vocabulary development was extremely significant but results from cycle two vocabulary assessments showed no statistical improvement, in fact, overall, there was a decrease in academic vocabulary. Some of my practices were not EXACTLY the same and I will take that lesson with me. However, with results like these, I get to thinking, did the math lesson that day just have lesson math words to talk about? Some students' standardized math score actually went down after the two-week intervention. Can one really measure any kind of learning in two weeks? A big take-away is that I just don't know enough about statistics. But I do love to see my students improve. Where will I go from here? For some reason I want to fly in a completely different direction but staying on the highway I am, I'd like to continue to give students more work time with a classmate as opposed to teacher-talk listening time. I am a little unsure about reversing the roles of learners and teachers in the future since I think that naturally, those who need more help in math will ask for it instead of taking on a teaching role and those who can assist more will do so. However, perhaps I can change the titles, even if to simply have the student in need of math support repeat the steps or lesson verbally to their partner. I also want to focus on getting the peer-teacher the support they need. I'd love to have more rotation of partners but I'm not sure how to make that happen with strict COVID restrictions in the classroom as far as proximity and desk space are concerned. Mostly, I'm happy to turn in this paper to let my brain relax and hopefully get the creativity flowing again.
For this class period we did some studying of different instructional models. In particular we learned about Challenged Based Learning and flipping the classroom. In Challenge Based Learning or CBL, students encounter real world challenges that require brainstorming and often teamwork. These real world problems are often more engaging for students than a made up problem. In a flipped classroom design, much of the input is done at home as homework, often through videos, so that students can come to class and work on engaging activities with peers and with the guidance of the teacher as the "guide on the side." Last year, we were required to teach the whole class two twenty minute lessons over Zoom in language arts and math and then hold office hours. Our instruction could be live or pre-recorded. I learned to make many pre-recorded mini-lessons and accompanying exercises on Seesaw and use my shorter live sessions for checking in, review, and having kids connect with each other. Kids who needed help with exercises could pop in for help during my other office hours. This year, my entire day plus more is taken up by synchronous instruction...that's 5 hours per day. Most prep time is taken up by a twice per week team collaboration meeting requirement, staff meetings, and IEP/SST meetings. I love the idea of having a flipped classroom, but as it is, it takes me at least 30 minutes, often an hour, to design a nice Seesaw activity for my team with a 5 minute video all just for one math lesson. My question has always been, how and where do teachers find the time to develop both in class and out of class materials? I am bothered whenever I see students' eyes glazing over and I know it's because they need to be more actively engaged. Having them take part in an activity during the entire class would alleviate this problem but can I trust 7 year olds (and all their parents) to watch my instructional videos at home? I think most did last spring, but not all. As for the real world challenges, I think if it were the end of July, I'd be able to come up with some great ideas. Right now, it's hard for me to find real world problems that students would actually get excited about for all the topics we are studying in math. I was scratching my head over real world problems for measuring things with inches and later feet. The whole concept feels real world to me. They can measure their pencil boxes, their shoes, their room length, etc. but these are not real world problems until they fix something that was a need. Especially teaching virtually and kids not being able to work in groups (physically together) make it difficult to think of applying this right now.
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..." 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? So many interesting and powerful ideas were presented in the videos I watched for this week's class. The videos were, A new culture of learning (Youtube talk), by John Seely Brown, Five minds of the future, by Howard Gardner, and Bring on the Learning Revolution by Sir Ken Robinson, and The surprising science of motivation by Dan Pink. I also read an article from Forbes Magazine by August Turak, entitled, Can Creativity be Taught? There is so much to glean from the messages of these authors and presenters. Here are some of the major themes I noticed in the messages: Autonomy and Agency: Dan Pink mentions that successful companies such as Atlassian, have figured out that employees come up with the best ideas when they are given a free day to delve into anything they would like and present their work and findings to the team later. As a teacher, I would be elated to be able to choose my own focus, style, or study for the year and present what I did to my peers at school. I know that teachers are in their little classrooms trying out new things constantly but we're not talking about those things that teachers are most passionate about. Likewise in class, I'm not talking about the things my students are most passionate about. But were I to give them the freedom and tools to do some research I know they would blow me away. This summer when I completed my learner profile assignment and had a long interview with one of my students from that previous school year, I learned that he had learned everything there was to know about geckos, after spending countless hours on youtube and informational websites. Motivation: I am fascinated by the study of motivation. August Turak shared how many studies have demonstrated that participants actually perform worse when offered a monitory reward for completing a task or solving a problem first. Motivation is closely tied to agency. Humans are so much more motivated by their own passions. Even being given the freedom to explore something new can create a desire in itself to invest a lot of energy into the new topic without need of a reward. In my credential program, I learned quite a lot about intrinsic motivation and choice theory only to find that in all elementary schools I interviewed for and subsequently worked in, external rewards were the name of the game. This external reward element has now permeated my own teaching because it is so tangible to students but letting the joy of learning and the sense of accomplishment in and of itself be the primary reward for learning is something I'd like to better foster. Collaboration/Community John Seely Brown cited a Harvard study that showed that the best predictor of student success in college was not their gpa nor their SAT score, rather their ability to join or form study groups. This was music to my ears as I continue with my study of peer teaching. Sometimes I wonder about the students who aren't passionate at all about what we are studying, and the students who are passionate but are being held back by their peer learners. Fostering a Creative Mindset: We have so many standards and pacing guides that we focus on that sometimes we forget that most importantly we must teach a "questing mindset." Information is changing all around us but students who are passionate about topics, pull together with others to learn more from each other. Information and processes are constantly changing around us that it hardly makes sense to focus teaching on algorithms and procedures linked to an old system of productivity. Changing habits of mind seems to bet the best way to move forward. I feel I am at the crossroads of three very important journeys in my masters project right now. First, I am supposed to be reading about how to research and write by reading the research books, The Power of Questions by Beverly Falk, and Action Research by Craig Mertler. But I'm also supposed to be researching peer-reviewed literature at the same time. I also want to do some reading up on the authors, Jo Boaler and John Hattie, who I think could be seminal authors for my work. Lastly, I am in the thick of my first cycle of action research in the classroom. I wish I could have had this done earlier but...here we are. My action research cycle is very short, two weeks. However, even in two weeks, I have seen so much growth. I am researching the effects of peer teaching in 2nd grade math and I have to say it is THRILLING to watch the kids open up like they hadn't before, when given a chance to collaborate. I used assessment data to separate kids into tutors and learners and I think this has really been key to having successful peer teaching happen in our Zoom breakout rooms. I hop from room to room watching and listening. On Friday, a student who, before this, never spoke to his peers, ever, was having a full conversation about the math task with his team member. I am also finding some big benefits to Zoom even though I'm tired of working on Zoom just like everyone else. The learner has to share his/her screen and the tutor has to use her/his words to explain what to do or ask questions. The screen sharing role avoids the common problem of one student doing all the brain and written work and one sitting on the sidelines watching. Another plus is the added help in explaining technology tools. Of course I've modeled time and time again how to manipulate and use tools on Seesaw to complete assignments but now that students are having to complete assignments in front of each other, they are getting real time help from their classmates with the tech. One student didn't know how to hold the trackpad button down and drag at the same time to draw a simple line. By doing the assignment with him, his peer could help instruct him regarding the use of technology. That is the fun part. The difficult part is being at this point where I feel that everything is priority number one or I need each building block to get to the next and there is no way to stack them in a sequenced order for me to climb up. I know I'll get through this busy phase soon and hopefully the data shows what I've been seeing so I can have something substantial to write about. |
Minna NummelinLife-long learner and dual language 2nd grade teacher. Archives
April 2021
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