Weekly Notes- Entry 1

Monday through Thursday of the past week was spent in mini-lessons of poetic purpose, symbolism, theme, and real-world connections.

Monday was very eye-opening for both teachers and students.  The students really seemed to get a better understanding of why authors write poetry and why they use symbolism.  The most common conclusion drawn by the students was "so that future generations can understand and relate to what they are really talking about."

Tuesday was another teacher-led discussion of another 2 poems.  More time was given for students to read and think independently, and then we came back together as a class to deepen our understanding through discussion.

Wednesday, students were again guided by the teacher to compare 2 more poems with similar themes. This time, themes were discussed before reading the poems.  This seems to greatly increase the students ability to understand the poem independently.  By knowing the theme before reading, students were better able to pick out the different forms of symbolism used by the authors.

Thursday, students were left to work in small groups to compare and contrast 2 additional poems with a recurring theme. In 2 classes, the set up worked perfectly, and students were able to correctly identify theme and continue to have intellectual discussion about the poem.  However, there were 2 classes that had extreme difficulty even when allowed to work in groups.  They main concerns seemed to be (1) whether or not the activity was being graded and if they had to turn something in that day.  (2) Most wanted me to "hold their hand" through the entire poem analysis and never attempt to complete it independently.  The 1st factor I attribute to the nature of the school setting, and it was expected.  The 2nd factor was expected, but I did not expect it to be so wide spread.  From one group (6th period), the major thing noticed was a lack of confidence in their own abilities, thoughts, and opinions, which was indicated in the initial survey.  However, because the survey did not identify students by class period, I was not aware that the majority of the students with these issues were in the same class.  After further review, it was discovered that most of these students had the same language arts teacher(s) in 7th and 6th grade, which would lead me to the conclusion that previous environment played a huge role in their confidence levels.  The students with higher confidence levels all came from the same 2 teachers' classes in 7th grade.  This is a new issue that I did not foresee in my planning, but I find it quite interesting.  I would like to explore this aspect of the project and see how it contributes to the data and the overall effectiveness of my AR project.

Friday, the students were allowed time to finish up the independent activity that they began on Thursday.  On Friday, the students were also introduced to the digital story project. Students overall seemed very deeply moved by the example video that I showed them.  This was the video that I made during EDE as a sample project.  I explained to the students how this project would be the connection between their classwork, their independent reading novels, and their research papers.  The students all seemed to be excited about the project.  There were some students who had trouble brainstorming ideas, but I did not want to share individual ideas that other students previously shared with me.  There were other students who immediately made connections between things that their parents discussed with them or things they had seen on the news.  Many of the students want to rely on things that they learned about in their US history classes, and not try to find anything modern.  This problem mainly occurred during that same class (6th period) that had trouble with the rest of the week's activities.   Some groups immediately cam up with great ideas.  I had 1 group mention an idea that I did not think was very appropriate, especially for school.  I even double checked with my principal, and she agreed.  However, it was extremely insightful, and it was the exact type of depth that I wanted the students to develop over the course of this project.  For reasons of privacy and security, I will not share the exact contents of the inappropriate suggestion on this page, but it is noted in writing. I will work with critical friends to decide whether or not it should ever be included in the final results and data sharing on this project.

This coming week, students will begin planning their projects through the use of a storyboard.  Students will also have a chance to use the internet to find copyright friendly pictures to use for their projects.

Pre-Cycle Surveys

I was completely overwhelmed this week, and I made a push to begin my AR project data collection, even though I don't think I was quite ready.  It was partially due to the fact that we have a new Month 6 blog post due next week.  I have to give a report of the progress that I am making. My students thought that I was absolutely crazy.  The multiple choice survey went well, but the qualitative/short answer survey had me a bit worried.  After peeking at the answers for the 1st group I decided not to look anymore until the end of the day when all of the students had completed the survey. 

Everything that could go wrong with technology did.  My Screenflow video that explains to children how to complete the survey would not work.  For some reason, even though I have used You Tube millions of times at school, I could not get it to work on Wednesday.  The site was blocked, and kept redirecting to my district homepage.  This only happened in the Firefox browser.  When I was able to open the video in the Internet Explorer browser, 1 class was already finished and a new class arrived.  Then for that class, the audio in the video would not work.  There was some sort of malfunction with video projector being used.  I regrouped after lunch, but then the audio would not play loud enough for the students to hear.  After 3 classes of "video disaster" I decided to give up on the tutorial video.  I did not even attempt to show the video to the last class (7th period).  I am not sure how this will affect the results of the survey, but I hope that the impact is not too negative.  I guess I won't know until the end.  I did, however, give my students some basic instructions, repeating the majority of the things that I included in the video tutorial.  Hopefully, that was enough to make it work.  I could really use some clean data.

Aside from the typical 8th grade practical joke or 2, the data looks pretty good so far.  I haven't sat down and really analyzed it, but glancing at it has made me rethink my measure of success for this project.  These kids are a lot worse off than I originally imagined, and I definitely have my work cut out for me.  I certainly hope that when I take a deeper look at the data, I feel better.  If not, I may have to completely restructure what I was planning to do in the different phases of my cycles.

Action Research Updates

FYI: I decide to switch the script. I will now be using this blog to blog/log my updates about my action research.  Rather than to create yet ANOTHER blog, I am going to use this one to keep my log of the events that happen.  I will still keep anectdotal records so that what i write here is correct and up to date, but I will blog for my actual log/record so that I can access it from anywhere. I won't have to worry about carrying around a notebook everywhere losing little sheets of paper. 

Here goes!
Stay tuned