Progress: I feel as like I have made some progress in my classroom implementing my new ideas. For my capstone I wanted to use GLAD strategies to see if they would make a positive effect on transliteracy skills. Now that I have implemented various units I feel more confident and I am seeing my students' comprehension scores improve. I am currently seeing my students engaged in our animal unit. They are given various web sites and they have to find their animal facts and in turn write a report. I plan to also have them make a slide show on their animal to incorporate more technology. Struggles: I am struggling with time. Time is running out this school year and I still have to put everything together. SBAC testing is taking up most of my class time and it's hard to find time to let my students research. I am feeling the pressure to get this done fast and I am worried it won't come out the way I have it planned out in my head. Overall this class has challenged me to try new tools I had never even heard of like Adobe Spark. I love this tool and I will keep using it. I have made so much progress from the first day of the masters program. I feel like I can connect with so many people and it has really opened up my eyes to new technology.
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I feel like I have the steps I need in my design process, but they are are all over the place. I know that I have two audiences, students and teachers. Ultimately I want to have my students succeed in all literacy skills. I have been working with OCDE Project GLAD which includes different usage of modalities for students to use and improve in comprehension, vocabulary, writing, and it can all transfer into Spanish. GLAD (guided language acquisition design) helps students visualize and internalize new literacy information. My second audience are other teachers that are looking for ways to help their own students improve literacy skills. Teachers will have a place to see videos and sample lesson plans that work in increasing students comprehension skills in both English and Spanish. I am still struggling grasping the word "prototype" it is still messing me up. I am sill unsure of what is needs to look like. I keep hearing that it can be anything but my original mind map seemed too simple. My next steps are to upload all my pictorials, student work, chants, and somehow print their storyboardthat comprehension boards. Honestly I feel like using GLAD strategies makes transliteracy experiences more accessible to my students. It's no longer worksheets, but students are absorbing the pictorials, are staying engaged with literacy awards, and are applying their knowledge through storyboardthat.com and transferring that to essay writing. I still have a lot to do, the ideas are there I just need to organize and fill out all boxes along the way.
I am still on the creating phase of the prototype and I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. Looking at other prototypes I am not quite sure how I should set mine up. Once I created the table of contents things started falling into place, but I am still struggling. I know what I'm going to do and I have all my notes written down but I am still not sure how to turn those into a map. I guess my success is that I have my unit planned out and know the steps I am going to take to have my students complete the lesson. As I keep searching for map options I just have to keep telling my self it is a draft and it can be changed if needed.
Well, starting this semester I was not sure how I was going to evolve my driving question. Now towards the end of the second semester I am still not sure how to word my driving question. I know that I want to focus on getting my 3rd grade Spanish dual Immersion students at grade level in reading comprehension in both languages. If not all at grade level, I want my students that are below grade level to improve their scores. Going through all the readings this semester I am learning new information that is very helpful for my action research. I am learning to take the learners view and make it the overall central focus of my project. From Baggio I am learning that the learner will retain information better if there are meaningful visuals to make connections to. This has made me think of the way I present information to my students. I have to make sure there are meaningful visual in my lessons. I am focusing on reading the text to the students and then they read it and I give a test on Friday. I need to present the information in a way that gets students attention and have the information imprint in their brain so they can make connections. Even the SITE model shares similar views of making connections between the learner and the context being learned. The learner is in the center of the model with informational sub context, technical sub context, and sociocultural sub context surrounding the learner. To me this means that everything the learner is accessing he/she has to make connections with to truly understand it and be able to apply it. As far as how SITE applies to me as a learner my literacy( Informational sub context) is the books we are reading, Baggio, Clark, Derven. This is where I am getting information to build my action research and how to best support my students. The opportunity( technical sub context) is all the time we have in class to explore and research new technology that will ultimately help my teaching by helping my students achieve their learning goals. Finally my motives (Sociocultural sub context) are my students and getting them to achieve at grade level reading comprehension scores.
Ultimately I want to address my students by finding a bilingual tool that can help them improve reading comprehension from their texts. However, teachers are the ones that will look at this and might want to adopt my idea if it works so the can possibly also help their own students if they are having the same problem. My school has been working a lot with GLAD and I am leaning towards using some of those strategies, since they are bilingual. I want to see if they have a positive impact on student reading comprehension. I have to incorporate visuals to keep students engaged and connected to the lesson. Baggio also talks about accessing prior knowledge so that students can make meaningful connections and better retain the information.
Baggio: What I drew from Baggio this week was her "Trilogy of the Mind". That there are three domains that the brain needs to learn, affective domain (emotions), cognitive domain( how you think), and conative domain ( how you instinctively do what you do) (Baggio pg.30). There is a lot that goes into learning and the according to Baggio the affective domain is the most important. I agree because emotions play an important part in our life and if we are upset we might not like something, but if we are having a good day and are in a good mood we might really enjoy that same thing we hated yesterday because we are looking at it with new eyes. It is the affective domain that I see most common in my students. When they are happy and know that they have to work hard through math so they can get that free time they give it their all and finish the lesson without complaints. On the other hand when they have not been on task and they have to owe me recess after math they complain about the lesson and we don't get to finish the lesson. Another key point I took from Baggio was the fact that prior knowledge is very important to help make connections and help make sense of new information. " Taking advantage of prior knowledge helps the visual system resolve this ambiguity" (Baggio pg 43). Thinking about my driving question I have to make sure I somehow access my student's prior knowledge and take that to connect to the new information.
Clark: There was a lot of information in these chapters, but what I understood was that in every lesson there must be key elements: Needs assessment, task analysis, learning objectives, assessment, development, course evaluation, and implementation. As I was reading about all these elements I couldn't help but picture my paper from last semester. My paper included these elements and my action research also followed some of these steps. What I took from the reading was that to be a good teacher then all the instruction must be explicit and students must be clear what the goals are. The teacher must provide appropriate materials, resources, and activate prior knowledge to facilitate learning. Dervin: Dervin talked about bridging the gap. As a teacher we must provide the appropriate tools to get our students to bridge the unknown material and make sense of the new information. As a teacher I need to be asking my students more why questions to get them thinking about the overall picture. Helping my students understand and make connections to the new material is what I need to strive to everyday in my teaching. I think that my driving question is something like " What strategy will help improve bilingual student reading comprehension, while keeping them interested/engaged?" My new need to knows are to find out what strategies are out there that are both in English and Spanish that will help my students with comprehension in reading. Baggio talks about providing useful visuals that the learner can use to help them better understand the material being taught. That adult learning is different from kid learning because adults ask why questions. Adults want to know the end product and what benefit they can gain from learning the information. Kids just do what the teachers ask and most of the time don’t ask why questions or what they can gain from learning the information. Kids just assume that’s how it has to be and do what they are told even if they can’t relate or comprehend the material. Baggio suggests that teachers should be the facilitators and must teach with their student’s perspective in mind. Teachers must find useful visual that students can access to help them better understand the material. Dervin also talks about teaching with the seekers perspective in mind. As the teacher we are the user or the help we give our students the seekers the tools to overcome the gap, or the unknown information. We have to teach our students to ask why questions to ask what benefit they will gain from learning this new information. So I guess what I learned from both authors was to keep my student’s perspective in mind and help my students understand the information and understand why they need to understand it. I have to make sure I don’t just teach to the test, but rather the big picture of why do my students need to learn the information and what can I do to facilitate their learning. My innovative learning journey has been an eye opening experience. I have been teaching for 4 years and with each year of experience I gain I am adding new tools to my belt. Starting this program I had no idea what I new tools I would gain, but so far I am adding a whole new way of looking at how I teach. I am learning how to think outside the box and teach my lessons based on how my students are understanding them and not based on the fact that we have to finish the lesson to keep up the pace and finish according to our pacing guide. I find it especially difficult to slow down during math. I have to stay on pace or I will "fall behind" and the students will not be ready for the upcoming test. I have found my self teaching to the test to make sure they have a passing score on their math test. This course has pushed my thinking and has assured me that I can slow down and have the students learning process and questions to guide my teaching not so much keeping up with the pacing guide.
After reading Dervin's "Sense making The Mind's Eye", a second time it became a bit clearer. I was able to relate to two quotes from Dervin's article first, "that human use of information and information systems needs to be studied from the perspective of the actor, not from the perspective of the observer"; second, "the approach attempts to provide a vehicle for giving voices to users and potential users of systems so that the systems can be responsive to them" These two struck me because I can relate them to my students. My students are the seekers, the curriculum is the gap, and the use is me, the teacher. I have to develop my lessons with my students perspectives in mind, not my own. I usually prepare my lessons by looking at the teacher edition and taking a look at the standards and where they have to be at the end of the lesson. I am now finding myself questioning why I am doing that. I am starting to understand that as the teacher I should facilitate my student's learning and have their questions guide my teaching. I need to provide the best learning environment and let them problem solve as a team. Let them know that if they don't get it right the first time it's ok, making mistakes is part of learning. "By using powerful visual images to impact the way people learn, you can increase the probability that the learner will learn. By positioning him or her in the learning zone, a place that takes into account where the learner is and what we know about learning, you will have created an environment that supports the individual's ability to learn" (Baggio p.9). If I can connect Dervin and Baggio I would have to say that Dervin talks about taking the seekers' perspective and ask questions about how they would like to be helped; Baggio talks about providing the best learning environment and useful visuals for the seeker so that they can increase their probability to learn. Overall my learning experience in this program has forced me to take a close look at my teaching and have the courage to change my teaching if it's not working for my students. It's giving me so many tools already and can't wait to keep learning even more to help my students succeed. The only way I could make sense of it was to take notes. When I write down my thoughts and what I understad then it starts to make sense. This was a hard article to read and understand; with that said what I understood was that sense making is how an individual reacts during a specific event in time . That same individual may have a different reaction at a different time or if circumstances change. The overall theme I got was that communication was key between people and cultures. That communication changes as people live through different experiences. Dervin states "Some judge a moment by use of a standard, others judge by familiarity or comfort". Thus people form assumptions about the information and may miss inform due to it.
If I were to teach this to high school kids I am not sure how I would teach it, this was hard for me to understand. I would definetly have to break the material into 2 parts and have them work in partners to come up with the same situations but variations to what happens to individuals. Then I would have students compare how communication would change depending on the variation each individual experiences. Here is the link to my final research paper
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i-ZWmT1wEKlbsRp2Yvy5erVjYtC7nCcv2EXmtcxpolI/edit?usp=sharing |
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May 2018
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