TE808 Reflection

TE808 was a useful experience for my teaching practice.  It allowed me to learn about a new approach to teaching, try it out and see how well it worked with my students.  I found that teaching word study in small groups has been much more effective, particularly for my extremely low and high students.  The students also seem to enjoy it more than when I’ve done whole-class lessons.  Furthermore, when I tried a new word study technique, I found that it may not be effective and not be a useful exercise for my students.  I think its important that I found this out so that I don’t give my students fruitless assignments. 

From TE808, I realized the importance of setting small deadlines for big assignments.  I was also enrolled in another grad class this semester that did not do this for us.  I (of course) waited until the last two weeks to get any assignment done and was extremely overwhelmed (thank goodness I already had most of my TE808 stuff done by that point).  Therefore, for future courses I need to break down assignments on my own ahead of time.

The most difficult part of TE808 was finding time in my classroom to actually collect data.  The data method I chose was very time consuming and difficult to do with a large number of students.  However, this method also helped me get a better insight into how some of my students read, specifically what cues they use when trying to decode words.  Therefore, the most difficult part may have also been the most beneficial.

If a colleague was interested in taking TE808, I would recommend that they take it, however, prepare them that it is a lot of work and requires a lot of writing!

TE808 Textbook Evaluation

Action research: Teachers as researchers in the classroom was a very useful “handbook” for  helping to write the action research paper.  I think the most helpful components were chapters 4, 5, and 6.  I had not been familiar with all of the different sub-types of quantitative and qualitative studies.  This book gave a nice overview of it.  What would have helped additionally was perhaps an outside article that gave more detailed descriptions of the differences between some of the quantitative studies because I found them to be very similar as they were explained in this book. 

The description in Chapter 5 of how to determine reliability and consistency for quantitative data was also useful.  I had not been introduced to the formulas for testing these and this book made it easy to follow.  I also found the analyzing data walk-through of StatCrunch to be helpful and made me think about what I needed to calculate.  It has been many years since I took a statistics class and back then I was confused of when to use different formulas.  This book streamlined the formulas, made it easy to determine what formulas were needed, and how to apply them. 

I would recommend this book for future classes.  It was a great, concise overview of the action research process.  The first few chapters were probably helpful for people who have not had experience with action research in the past.  While the later chapters, were useful for anyone who is conducting action research as it reminds you of the minute steps to consider when conducting these projects. 

Only a couple of the outside articles I found useful.  The most useful was Guidelines for Developing Action Research Questions (Riel, 2011), because it gave another lenses for thinking about my own action research project.  The other articles seemed to become rather redundant of the textbook or of each other.  An outside article that I had to read for another class I found helpful when thinking about my theoretical framework.  That article was The Teacher’s Guide to Diversity from Brown University part I (Trumbull & Pacheco, 2005).  This gave a good refresher of the different educational theories. 

TE808's Alignment with MATC Standards

The main focus of TE808 has been our action research project.  This project is very closely aligned with nearly every MATC standard. 

Standard 2 - Understanding of subject matter, how to teach It, and how to design curriculum,  instruction, and assessment to foster students’ understanding. 
This project requires us to try something new in our classrooms.  For many of us, this has involved an adaptation of existing curriculum or trying out a new instructional approach.  The literature review helped reinforce how a subject should be taught.  For example, my literature review reinforced the need for differentiated small-group instruction for word study that is developmentally appropriate for each child.  By changing the way word study is taught in my classroom, I have been designing a word study curriculum by taking components from three different published series, implementing it, and assessing students to not only see what they have learned but to determine the effectiveness of the curriculum.

Standard 3 - Understanding and use of theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks to situate and analyze issues and problems of practice and policy.
The literature review helped to root our project within a theoretical perspective and helped to determine whether what we were trying is “best practice.”

Standard 4 - Reflective, systematic inquiry and study/refinement of one’s practice
The entire action research project is an attempt to refine our teaching practice in order to provide more effective instruction for our students.  This required reflecting on our classroom’s to determine a problem and then find a potential solution to implement and study its effects.

Standard 5: Communication skills and information literacy
The literature review required us to access professional information and use it to make decisions about our action research projects.  Furthermore, by publishing our action research via a blog or website it reflects our technological-literacy.

Standard 6: Proactive participation in collaborative initiatives, professional learning communities, professional organizations, and teacher leadership beyond the classroom
The peer feedback and interaction on the FAQ boards are step towards this standard.  Tis standard is not quite fulfilled however, because, for the most part, the interaction is not proactive.  Rather it is a requirement of the course.  However, the exercise of doing it may help some people see its benefits and prompt them to do it proactively on their own.

This course also fits within Goal 1 of the MATC program - Critical Inquiry.  Action research is even given as one of the examples of critical inquiry and TE808 is where many students (those who were not former MSU interns since a more mild form of this was done in TE802) are introduced to action research for the first time.

TE808: My Action Research Project

My Topic
Utilizing Words Hunts to Make Word Study More Meaningful

Why I Chose This Topic
A large part of the first grade curriculum is phonics and word study.  The curriculum that my district has adopted seemed way too easy for the vast majority of my class last year, while a few students struggled with the material.  Furthermore, the students didn’t seem to apply what was taught in word study (through word sorts and other word work) to their reading and writing.  Therefore, I decided to change my approach to teaching word study.  I decided to utilize Words Their Way and Word Matters to create small-group instruction plans at students’ developmental levels.  These small-group instruction plans would be taught in conjunction with the district-mandated phonics curriculum (however, some of the lessons from the phonics curriculum were omitted since they overlapped with student’s word study (i.e. word families).

Through the Literature Review, I found strong support for small-group word study instruction that includes word sorts.  However, I also came across a new strategy that, although there has been limited research, is supposed to help students extend what they learn in word study to reading.  That strategy is word hunts.  Therefore, the focus of my study is to determine whether the inclusion of word hunts in word study instruction helps students apply what they’ve learned to their reading.

Writing my Proposal
The proposal writing was similar to the abstract writing done with science research reports.  Determining how data would be collected was the easiest step (once I had decided on my final research question (see Writing my Literature Review).  I knew I wanted to take a quantitative approach because it seems to be less subjective than the qualitative methods.  The most difficult component of the proposal was defining my research design.  My research design seemed to have features of certain designs while lacking other features.  For example, it has some elements of quasiexperimental designs.  However, rather than grouping students so that groups are similar, the variable and the control are applied to every student within their homogenous groups.  I decided to go with this design and in writing my proposal address this difference and how it would be dealt with (only looking at trends within groups with each group having a control period and an experimental period).

Writing my Literature Review
The literature review was similar to a lot of the literature reviews I have had to do when doing science research projects.  However, one thing that made the writing process easier than in those projects was grouping the research findings by themes and presenting each theme within its own section.  This made it much easier to organize the vast majority of information.

Through the literature review, I found that my 2nd draft research question - What is the effect of homogenous grouping of students for word study on first grade students’ spelling accuracy? - had already been answered by many studies.  It was unanimous that the homogenous grouping of students was the most effective format for instruction.  Therefore, I had to tweak the focus of my study.  I found my new focus also through the research, or rather lack thereof.  In Word Matters and Words Their Way the authors mention utilizing word hunts.  However, when I went to find research on the usefulness of this strategy, there was little to be found. 

Peer Writing Feedback
The peer feedback helped me to think out some of the potential problems in my study and to make my research question clearer.  It was also a “check” to make sure I had written explicitly enough so that it was clear that each element of the rubric was present.  The peer feedback helped my research question evolve the most (the question itself probably went through 5-7 different drafts).  My question changed scope and targeted learning goal throughout the drafts to make it more focused. I also found others in the class with similar research projects and we were able to share literature sources and ideas for making this research feasible in the classroom.