Action Research: Finishing Up Phase 1

This Wednesday (May 1st) will mark the official end of my phase one of AR. My Research (with a capital r) involves introducing a written dialogue between my students and I. What I am looking for is if the introduction of these conversations will have any impact on their productivity during class and test scores. I have obtained a journal type notebook for each student where we can converse from topics ranging from what they did over the weekend to what they think is difficult about school. I have implemented 2-3 questions per week for the past 3 weeks. The results have been promising so far but up to this point there has been no change in test scores. Student participation and productivity has raised which I am happy about.

There are a total of 24 students and I tend to take around 5 minutes min. responding to each students' response to each of the questions. Needless to say that is a big chunk out of the day after student-teaching, night class and other program requirement. However it is well worth it. The class dynamic is much smoother and I am finding it easier to hold them accountable for their actions, or lack of action, the more I get to know them.

One thing that I have noticed is that I started to exhibit some of the feelings I read about in my education classes where teachers tend to focus more energy on the kids who are producing and participating. I caught myself more than a few times putting more thought and effort into my responses where students wrote more than the students who only wrote a few sentences.

This goes against my view of what a teacher should be. But having this experience made me empathize with those teachers who get frustrated with lower achieving who show little effort and motivated me to not only go back and re-write my responses, but to write MUCH more to those students so they see that no matter what they write, I am going to give it my all to respond to them. My hope is that this will produce a tipping point to where they actually produce more writing in their responses. Here is an example: My writing is in pen and student writing is in pencil.

Another challenge is changing the way I write. Since these are middle school students I am really trying to put more emotion in my writing like exclamation points and smiley faces...I don't know if I will ever get used to the smiley faces though