Cycle #1 - action (part I)

Here are the first results of my Cycle #1 actions! Click on the hand-out to enlarge it to legible size. During a common planning meeting, teachers and I assessed the quality and context of this student writing work in order to see what we could learn from it. According to Garrison (2006), the most effective way to conduct formative assessment that impacts instructional practice is through the establishment of collaborative teams like ours.

We viewed this student's work via a projector and Smartboard, which allowed us to collaborate and mark up the text simultaneously. Portions of the student work that teachers discussed during our meeting are highlighted, with some comments alongside in word bubbles.

We used the Collaborative Assessment Conference protocol (McDonald et al, 2007) to examine this student's progress on her feature article writing. At this point, we were looking for a strong topic; a unique, focused angle; and a specific plan for research. Some things that the teachers noticed:

• K**** has an interesting topic that will probably be engaging to an audience of her peers.
• Although K**** does not have an angle listed, it appears that she might have an angle in mind. See the arrow indicating where this idea should go.
• K**** could benefit from some conferencing about what kinds of facts and statistics can strengthen a feature article.
• This student was successful in generating ideas for interviews and quotes. This could be used as a strength to 'teach into' when talking with K**** about other evidence to include.
• K**** might need some quiet writing time to reflect and expound upon her personal experiences with this topic.

After our collaborative meeting, I started an email list-serve with the teachers to reflect upon our discussion. In the email, I posed two questions based on the protocol: 1) What was particularly helpful or difficult for you in this collaboration? and 2) How will this experience impact your practice?

Cycle #1 - research & reflection (part III)

DATA: COMMON PLANNING NOTES
During a common planning meeting, teachers and I discussed their administrator's (and my organization's) stated goal of gathering data by analyzing student writing. At our training institute, the teachers were shown a Teacher Checklist (click on the title of this post to view) that could be used for formative assessment throughout the writing unit. The checklist was one way of helping us to focus on continuous and careful examination of each student's writing process. Here were several teachers' responses when we began to discuss the goal of sharing student work:

1. "How is student work a goal?"
2. "Isn't student work just anything the students write down?"
3. "Well, we are always looking at student work..."

There seemed to be a disconnection between the stated goals of the administration and the personal goals of the teaching staff. I realized that before we could start sharing and assessing student writing, I would need to try to provide some structure for what we would analyze and how we would collaborate.

The 'what' came pretty easily as I planned my action. The writing unit we were working on was already designed to provide lots of concrete evidence of a student's process: chart notes about the genre (feature articles), conference notes about topic & angle, discussion board posts about research. The 'how' was a little trickier to determine, but I decided that some structure would help.

I decided that my action would be to plan a meeting in which teachers analyzed a student's progress thus far in their Feature Articles writing unit. I accessed protocols from McDonald, Mohr, Dichter & McDonald (2007) at http://www.teacherscollegepress.com/ to organize our group process during this meeting and chose the Collaborative Assessment Conference protocol as the most appropriate for our initial attempt at collaboration. Here is the plan:

1. Display the student work on a Smartboard. The work should be the final planning sheet from TMI Feature Articles Handout 1.4 which details the student's choice of topic, angle and inquiry plan. The use of a Smartboard allows a large group of teachers to simultaneously view the work without wasting paper on copies which would likely be discarded anyway. It also protects a student's privacy against the possibility of others seeing the sample in the trash.
2. The student's ELA teacher will give a brief presentation of the work with a description of the context. Although the protocol calls for minimal context, I feel that it would be helpful in this case because these teachers have so little experience with collaboration. In addition, Dearman & Alber (2005) state that reflective conversations about student work should focus on assessing both the quality of the work as well as the context.
3. ELA team members take turns at the Smartboard describing what they see in the work. Another benefit of the Smartboard is that it allows teachers to make collaborative notes and see each other's thoughts displayed visually. Teachers can select, highlight or mark up the work as necessary without compromising the original piece. I will encourage participants to describe without evaluating as they discuss the work.
4. Team members will discuss, "What questions does this work raise for you?" The presenting teacher will listen and make notes.
5. Team member will discuss, "What do you think this student is working on?" My role will be to encourage rigorous thinking by pressing members for evidence from the work. At this point we may delineate student strengths and needs.
6. The presenting teacher will respond to any questions or discuss the work from his/her perspective.
7. Reflection - Most teachers have very little time in their schedule dedicated to collaboration (Korsheed, 2007). Since our common planning is typically only ~35 minutes, reflection will take place through the use of an email listserve. In addition, Burns (2006) has researched email as a reflective tool and found implications for its use with students; I feel that it would be equally useful for teachers to use this way because it allows some time for thought between the collaborative learning and the response.

Cycle #1 - research & reflection (part II)

DATA: PHOTOGRAPHS OF STUDENT WORK DISPLAYS
In my previous post I stated that I would post some photographs of student work once I could ensure privacy. Here are some photographs of the displays of student work I saw. The work pictured below is representative of other shared work that I observed as I toured schools: colorful, artistic/visual in nature, aesthetically pleasing, very little writing, often group work. Other displays (not pictured below) included "Personal Color Wheels" and line drawings of animals.

I did not observe any writing work displays with the exception of very brief responses to literature in the form of the "3-D Postcards" pictured below. This suggests to me that perhaps wall displays of writing are not favored by school personnel. I can hypothesize several possible reasons why: hesitation to display 'imperfect' work (spelling errors, typos, etc.); difficult to read small print or type while walking in the hall or seated at a distance in the classroom; difficulty getting a 'finished [written] product' out of individual students (as expressed to me by one administrator).

However, Dearman & Alber (2005) have stated that the purpose of viewing student work is to refine instructional strategies; this cannot occur if only certain types of student work are being considered. In addition, researchers (Dearman & Alber, 2005; Fisher, Lapp & Flood, 2005) have found that reflection on student work should include dialogue about the quality and context of the work. With only limited samples of work being displayed and very little information being provided about the context in which the work was produced, the schools in which I work are limiting their ability to have these types of reflective conversations.

One Laptop Per Child (in New York City)

So the connection to my project here is very loose, but...this was too cool not to share! The non-profit organization for whom I work has joined forces with Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative and is piloting a project in NYC public schools using the laptops. The "XO" laptop has audio and video recording capability along with BETTER WIRELESS connectivity than your expensive Mac or PC - and it only costs $188! Check it out - here's a picture of me photographing the laptop while it videotapes me! Click on the title of this post to learn more.

Data Alignment

Listed below is a table showing how my data will align with my subquestions (Falk & Blumenreich, 2005, p. 67). Can anyone suggest any other questions or sources that I should include? Click on the table to enlarge it to a legible size.

Participants

I am working with English/Language Arts and Technology teachers in several New York City schools. For demographic information about the student population in each of my schools, please visit the following websites:
J.H.S. 216 (George J. Ryan) in Fresh Meadows, Queens
M.S. 321 (Minerva) in Washington Heights, Manhattan
Church of God Christian Academy (COGCA) in Far Rockaway, Queens
P.S./I.S. 323 in Brownsville, Brooklyn

Last night in Fieldwork class, we talked about the potential importance of background information when a researcher is studying teachers. So...here is some additional information about my participants' backgrounds.

Education/Training: 63% traditional 4-year preparation program including student teaching; 26% alternative preparation route (New York City Teaching Fellows or Teach for America); 11% without any formal preparation
Specialty/Expertise: 78% general education ELA; 11% special education ELA; 11% educational technology
Experience: 53% 3 years or less; 47% more than 3 years (I used the 3-year window because it is frequently the point where many teachers either burn out or decide to stay in the field)
Ethnicity: 58% White; 32% Black; 5% Asian/PI; 5% Hispanic; 0% Native American; 0% other

What else do you think I need to know about my teachers?

Perspectives & Biases

What perspectives and/or biases might you have that will impact how you will approach your question? (Falk & Blumenreich, 2005, p. 38)

I guess you could say that I am pretty biased when it comes to technology. I believe with my whole heart that it is absolutely essential for us as educators to bring our classrooms into the 21st century through the use of technology. Not doing so, in my opinion, borders on educational malpractice, especially in urban schools (see my "Use of Technology in Literacy Instruction" presentation, posted 2/17/08). This is my perspective as a teacher of children K-8.

When I taught elementary and middle school in Atlanta, technology was as integrated into our school day as books were. I have led my students on inquiry webquests, encouraged them to practice their fluency through electronic storybooks, communicated with them through e-mail and created collages from digital images. We webbed our thoughts using programs like Inspiration 8; they tracked their own progress through a website called Quia; they peer-edited in Google documents and published their writing on the internet.

Students are using technology to read and write all the time outside of school. They send each other text messages and instant messages. They e-mail each other. They communicate in a myriad of ways on social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Then they come to school and are told to write with pencil in their marble notebooks. This is creating a major disconnection between 'school' writing and 'real' writing for students and if it continues we will fail as educators to create true lifelong authors, readers or possibly learners. I believe that it is my job as a teacher to help students find connections between their 'real' lives and their academic ones. Technology is one way to do that.

Now that I have left the classroom to become a staff developer, my role and my focus has changed slightly. My research is focused on helping teachers, rather than students, to use technology to their benefit. However, my perspective remains the same: it is high time that we brought American schools into the 21st century.

Technology can make teachers' administrative and instructional tasks so much more efficient, thus helping to simplify an overly complex, mulit-tasked day. Grades can be automatically weighted and calculated, then posted securely online for parents, teachers and administrators to track from anywhere. Parents can contact school personnel from anywhere at any time using e-mail. All involved parties can collaborate around the work of students - sharing, commenting, praising, questioning, planning. Electronic calendars can be used collaboratively to keep everyone on track with events and assignments. The possibilities are endless.

So what does my perspective or bias mean for my research? It means that I need to be careful about making assumptions when it comes to teachers' confidence and competence with technology. Because many teachers are not already using technology, there may be a learning curve that needs to be addressed before I implement certain tools as the 'action' portion of my project. Also, I need to be aware that not every school or teacher has the funds to spend on new technology; therefore, I must be able to plan for only those tech tools that are already present, free or inexpensive to use.

Cycle #1 - research & reflection (part I)

DATA: TEACHER SURVEY RESULTS
For my first cycle of action research, I knew I needed to find out how (or whether) the teachers that I work with were already collaborating around student work. To do this, I collected two important pieces of data: 1) a survey of teachers' current practices and 2) photographs of student work that was currently being 'shared' (I will post these as soon as I can make sure all student identities are private).

I created a 10-question survey (see the results in my "Collaboration Survey" presentation embedded at the bottom of the blog) and posted it online. Throughout my research, I wanted to not only teach educators about the ways to use technology to collaborate, I also wanted to model some of these ways. So, that was one reason that I created an online survey rather than a written one. In addition, having the survey online would calculate results instantly (great for me), would allow respondents to see the cumulative results (interesting for teachers) and would allow teachers to take the survey whenever it was convenient for them. This last issue was important because it is one of the main reasons why I feel passionate about technology as an administrative and collaborative tool - it creates time and space in organizations where both are critically lacking (Johnston, Knight & Miller, 2007).

Because the results of my survey told me that most of the sharing of student work was happening through hallway and wall displays, I needed to find out exactly what this looked like. I toured my schools to see what kinds of student work was displayed. I found that these displays mostly consisted of eye-catching or aesthetically-pleasing types of work: tri-boards, colorful posters made by groups and art work. There was very little student writing posted on the walls of the classroom or hallways. It occurred to me again how technology can create spaces for sharing when physical spaces are already occupied.

Why not use the internet as a space for teachers to share student work? Teachers could quickly view each other's students' writing; parents could see in-progress work in a matter of minutes from their cubicle at work; students could read their peers shared writing and give feedback. After all, I thought, students and teachers are already using the internet for writing (instant messaging, social networking, emailing) - why not show them a way that they can also use it for the work they do at school?

Another thing that my survey told me was that teachers currently had very little time dedicated to collaboration. I am brainstorming ways that technology could create some flexible time for collaboration, discussion and reflection.

Official Research Question

The question that I plan to explore for my Master's Action Research Project is: how can I teach educators to use technology as a collaborative tool in examining student writing work to impact practice? Originally, I had planned to focus my question on teaching students. However, as a staff developer, my daily focus would be on training and educating teachers on ways to improve their literacy instruction; therefore, I felt that my work and my research would be better served by a question that also focused on teachers.

In an electronic environment, teachers can view student work at any stage from anywhere without carrying around huge volumes of notebooks and paper. They can also share student work easily with other teachers without depriving the student of their notebook for any length of time. It also eliminates the need for complicated time management among several teachers with very different lives and schedules and priorities. Teachers can collaborate online at home, at midnight or during lunch time at school.

I have experienced online collaboration with another teacher. We were both researching ways to improve student discourse during book club discussions. Because of our very different schedules, and because we wanted to collect data in the form of a transcript of our talk, I suggested that we use Google Talk to discuss the story. This way, we could easily monitor the length of our talk because it was right there on the screen; we could copy and paste a complete transcript of the discussion with no additional effort; and we could conduct the talk at a time and setting which worked for both of our schedules.

I have also explored other tools which could be used for professional collaboration. Nicenet, although it is designed for teachers and students, is useful because it allows private and public messaging, eliminating the need for lists of email addresses; it includes a schedule of upcoming events to keep everyone on pace; it functions somewhat like a wiki in the sense that both administrators and users can post conferencing topics and responses; and it has space for uploading documents which could easily take the form of student work upon which to collaborate. There is also an area of the environment in which users can post links; I can envision these links taking the form of ERIC documents related to the collaboration or even to YouTube videos which could provide models of practice.

Critical Incident One-Pager

There was a student named ***** at my fieldwork site last semester. She is reading below grade level but does not receive any additional time or attention from the classroom teacher. In spite of the fact that most of the other students in the class are able to comprehend grade-level text, ***** receives the same mini-lessons, the same amount of conference time, the same tools and the same absence of strategy group lessons or guiding reading as the rest of the class.

As part of a recent research project, I conducted an experiment on the impact that graphic organizers could have on the structure, engagement and proliferation of ideas in students’ writing and talking about their books. ***** was part of my experimental group and received the treatment of using a graphic organizer, an alphabet/story elements matrix. The class completed the assignments and I gathered my data, thinking that the experiment was over. Then ***** approached me.

“Miss Whitney, do you have any more of those charts?” she asked. “I think that really helped me understand the book.”

I was thrilled, of course, that I had done something to awaken understanding in one of my students. But I was also troubled – how many opportunities like this one had been missed by the lack of differentiation in the reading and writing workshops? Not all students are verbal/linguistic learners; some of these kids really need to create maps and diagrams, to sketch their envisionings or to dramatize what they see happening in their stories. Don’t students like *****, who may have some reading disabilities or gaps in their knowledge, need more time and attention? They need more hours, more explicit instruction, more scaffolding and more tools for support. I will finish with a quote from a former mentor: “Being fair doesn’t mean giving every child the same thing. Being fair means giving each child exactly what they need.”

Initial Reading Reflections

Almost every aspect of modern life is affected in some way by technology. Many people utilize technology from dawn to dusk to communicate; make decisions; reflect, gain, synthesize, evaluate or distribute information, among many other functions. One would be hard pressed to find a single professional, regardless of career field, going through an entire work day without touching a computer, PDA or other electronic device. However, the same level of technology use cannot be found in many schools, which are meant to prepare students for their future lives and careers in the ‘real’ world.

School districts struggling with funding issues may not have the financial capability to purchase state-of-the-art hardware or software. Teachers, especially the veterans of the profession who began their careers in an era largely free of technology, may lack adequate knowledge of the various electronic and digital tools available to them or training on how to use those tools effectively. Students may use technology more outside the classroom for enjoyment or communication without ever making the connection to its possibilities for their academic lives.

Research studies regarding the impact of technology on learning are woefully hard to find in today’s educational journals and literature. When such studies do exist, they are often limited either in scope of participants or applications, making the results difficult to generalize.

Technology can be used to bridge the early gap in exposure to print for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Internet-based reading programs are available. Students can access electronic books, interactive stories and leveled reading passages (Tracey & Young, 2005) or full texts through publicly available archives. If students lack hardware or internet access in the home, these resources can be accessed in the school building although use may be limited by space and time (Legutko, 2007). In addition, some districts may have access to reading software through federally funded programs or studies which often target specific skills and age groups (Means et al, 2007).

In addition, technology can be used to provide instructional opportunities for students where both parents work outside the home or work second- or third-shift. Microsoft NetMeeting is a tool included in older Microsoft operating systems that has web conferencing, audio, interactive whiteboard and chat capabilities (Legutko, 2007). Tutors and mentors can use this or another similar program such as a web-based instant messenger or e-mail to communicate with and instruct students whose parents may be unavailable for homework help in the afternoons or evenings (Burns, 2006).

Finally, technology can offer additional independent reinforcement for low-performing students in schools that cannot afford to lower teacher-student ratios. The studies show that students spent a greater portion of their day engaged in independent practice with teachers as facilitators and monitors when technology is integrated (Means et al, 2007). With the student leading his own independent practice and the technological tool providing support or feedback, technology can act as another teacher in the room when districts cannot afford to hire more teachers or paraprofessionals. In addition, mentors and tutors can be incorporated at little or no cost through web conferencing or chat tools (Burns, 2006).

Although a great deal of technology exists for use in the classroom as an instructional or administrative tool, there has been very little research conducted on its effectiveness outside the arena of reading comprehension. This justifies a call for increased study on the topic, not only on specific software products, but on more specific and diverse outcomes such as reading motivation, engagement and metacognition. In the meantime, there are many benefits that can be enjoyed by both educators and students – greater and more affordable access to leveled texts, more time spent on independent practice, increased access to tutors and mentors and variable effects on technological savvy and reading engagement.