Spring Break

Just because it's spring break, the work didn't stop.  I have been placing data in several graphs and looking over the information to come to conclusions about the research and its effectiveness.  I have also been placing all the information and data into a Prezi presentation that I will use at a later date.  Below is some of the information that I've placed into graphs and pie charts. Pseudonyms were used in all instances. Enjoy!

School Presentation

So the school presentation went well, my audience was engaged and asked some great questions.  Below are some pictures from the experience.

3/25/14

Agenda

1.       List 3 ideas

2.       Grade your own writing (1^st article and original writing)

3.       Begin writing your next article

7:29 Participant K and A entered room and were provided a piece of paper and pencil.  Walker, “list your 3 ideas please.”

7:30 Participant M entered room

7:33 Collected 3 ideas from Participant K and A

7:34 Gave Participant K and A the ReadWriteThink Writing Rubric (2004) and gave them, “Three to five minutes to read over it.”  “You’ve got four more minutes, read through each section so you know where your stuff fits.  Be honest!”

Gave original writing to grade themselves.

7:39 Gave copy of 1^st newspaper issue for participants to read and grade themselves.

7:37Particpant L entered room

7:42 Participant C entered room

 7:55 Participant J entered room

Presentation

Tomorrow I will be presenting my research process and research findings thus far to the fifth grade team teachers.  I am actually very excited to share my experiences and what I have found.  Below is a portion of what I will be presenting to the fifth grade team.  A few of my discussion points will be:

• Connection between: accountability and school culture
• Writing Survey Results
• Coding results
• Blog
• Reinke (2005) research tool

 I look forward to giving results from my presentation :) Wish me luck!

Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel

As my research efforts are starting to wind down, I can say that I've truly enjoyed the process.  My question, "What affect would the implementation of a school newspaper have on student writing?"  I noticed, throughout this process spawned other questions in regards to student motivation, behavior, and accountability.  This research process has allowed me to reflect on myself as a teacher, my peers, and our school culture as a whole.  Today I found myself having a conversation with one of my colleagues and had a revelation that part of the reason that it was such a challenge to get my participants to turn in their work on time or even turn in their work at all was due to the culture of the school.  Students not turning in their work or being late with their work is a part of the school culture!  Something that I plan to do is the on task/off task behavior monitoring chart designed by Reinke (2007).    I would love to perform this intentional observation in each of the fifth grade classrooms (because my participants were fifth graders) and present my findings to the fifth grade team.

At this moment I would say that I am about half way through my research process.  I will make necessary adjustments for the next (probably last) newspaper issue for the semester in order to hold participants and myself more accountable.  I say myself because Randy Sprick (1998) was mentioned as saying, "If teachers are unclear about their expectations, the kids learn it's all a crapshoot, so you might as well do whatever you want," (as cited in Knight, 2007, p.143).  I found the following video very interesting and relateable to my situation with holding my participants, or in this video's words, employees, accountable.

Newspaper Meeting for FINAL revisions

7:30 Participant A and M enter room

7:32 Participant A goes to get others, Participant M makes suggestion of making “letters” (words) bigger so that people can see them better.

7:33 Walker zoomed, “Yea, now it’s easier to read!”- Participant M

7:34 Walker tells participants to go to tables and review the agenda for today J Participant J enters.

7:37 Participants C, L, and A enters the room

• Each participant that turned in an article read aloud and received help from the other participants.
• Had to calm down Participant J several times (overly excited and beginning to bother other people on purpose)
• Made the requested changes based upon what each participant felt their article needed to be better.
• Most of the changes made were in regards to spelling and adding conclusions to articles.
• Participant K was absent.
• Ran out of time to really discuss article 2 and taking the survey.

8:00 “Your job is to give me a list of at least 3 ideas for your next article by tomorrow!”

Agenda 3/18/14

1.       Read individual articles out loud

2.       Make FINAL revisions

3.       Discuss article 2

4.       2^nd Garfield Survey

• The FINAL newspaper that was made, will be distributed today to each classroom.  I have also given all of the fifth grade the Garfield Writing Attitude Survey and am steadily working on getting the raw scores and percentile ranking from each one.

2 more articles turned in :)

Below is a revised article by Participant C, and also an article by Participant A.  These will be coded at a later time.