Introduction
One of the things I remember about my first few weeks were some of the interactions of the students in their groups. Some groups seemed to just fly through the reading material and accomplish their written assignments with ease, while others, often choosing to work alone, were obviously stuggling with just appearing to go through the motions. It was a very poignent moment for me and I remember wondering if there was a way to help all of the struggling students without slowing the others down. How could I teach the whole class?
In 2009, 45 states adopted the same standards for English and Math. The Common Core State Standards Initiative was a program that was created to increase our students' ability to better succeed in math and english, two subjects that seemed to be a challenge but were deemed vitally important to their future success. The standards were a response to the widespread belief that American students were struggling in their ability to read and write as well as practically understand mathematics at a level necessary to be successful in both college and in the work place. Further, global aptitudes studies showed the U.S. to be either near or at the bottom in placement for skills deemed critical in the global work place.
One of the things I remember about my first few weeks were some of the interactions of the students in their groups. Some groups seemed to just fly through the reading material and accomplish their written assignments with ease, while others, often choosing to work alone, were obviously stuggling with just appearing to go through the motions. It was a very poignent moment for me and I remember wondering if there was a way to help all of the struggling students without slowing the others down. How could I teach the whole class?
In 2009, 45 states adopted the same standards for English and Math. The Common Core State Standards Initiative was a program that was created to increase our students' ability to better succeed in math and english, two subjects that seemed to be a challenge but were deemed vitally important to their future success. The standards were a response to the widespread belief that American students were struggling in their ability to read and write as well as practically understand mathematics at a level necessary to be successful in both college and in the work place. Further, global aptitudes studies showed the U.S. to be either near or at the bottom in placement for skills deemed critical in the global work place.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or OECD (link) Measured around 470,000 15 year olds across the world in reading, math, and science. The studies looked at overall ramifications of lowering levels of abilities in terms of job and college competitive students on their parent economies. As the diagram to your left shows, the U.S. is 14th in reading, 25 in math, and 17th in science. The thrust of the arguments for the Common Core Standards was that our education system was lacking in providing the tools that colleges and employers found they needed most both locally and globally.
Bickford, A., Tharp, S., McFarling, P., & Beglau, M. (2002). Finding the right fuel for new engines of learning. Multimedia Schools, 9(5), 18-26 ".
The Common Core Standards were a concerted effort and response aimed at addressing these challenges. Common Core has been slowly making its way into formal curriculum and will be in full affect for San Diego Unified School District within the next year or so. History, whose focus up until now, was history, has given way as one of the primary vehicles for literacy. The new direction of instruction of history is literacy taught through the subject of history.
Bickford, A., Tharp, S., McFarling, P., & Beglau, M. (2002). Finding the right fuel for new engines of learning. Multimedia Schools, 9(5), 18-26 ".
The Common Core Standards were a concerted effort and response aimed at addressing these challenges. Common Core has been slowly making its way into formal curriculum and will be in full affect for San Diego Unified School District within the next year or so. History, whose focus up until now, was history, has given way as one of the primary vehicles for literacy. The new direction of instruction of history is literacy taught through the subject of history.
Last semester, during my first student teaching experience, I taught the first three periods of a 7th grade world history class whose abilities included students who were, GIFTED, average, and IEP/ELL students . As is the case in currently evolving pedagogy, the standardized test as a means of assessment has lost its luster and new ways of assessment, particularly in summative assessment, are in the mill. One alternative that began to grow in popularity was the Document Based Question. As testing itself has evolved away from the standardized test and towards a more reading and writing based assessment, the requirements focusing on the skills required to meet these new standards were weaving their way into new types of strategies. English is critical in this regard and when one looks at all of the subjects where students can focus on reading and writing, history comes up as the next big winner in terms of opportunity for growing these skills. No big surprise there since, young historians, as I like to call my students, are constantly reading primary and secondary sources.
This Spring semester, I have had the amazing opportunity work and to teach 11th grade U.S. history and U.S Government classes This school is also enthusiastically adopting the new directions towards skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking. The class that I have chosen for my AR has 30 students, all of mixed ability in skills. My new young high school historians have access to technology in the form of Ipads but and, for the moment, are only being used for simple research purposes. They seem to be a group that are rather socially unfamiliar with each other.
My first month at the school involved a professional development session on implementing writing strategies, as well as, two staff and department meetings aimed at implementing more skill strategies to increase writing in the curriculum. While this was occuring I was starting to get to know my students a bit better. I initially gave them a writing assignment about anything historical, anything at all, so that I could gauge skill and motivational levels. I also began to get to know the school dynamic as well. My new students were generally excited about the subject, having a student teacher, and the possibilities of the projects I talked about, but were worried about the subject being dull.
Getting a baseline view of my students' writing:
One of the very first things I did when I took over the class was to give an individual in class writing assignment based off of the historical concept of Manifest Destiny (that we had had lessons, activities, and a project for) in order to see what their writing looked like with formal instruction with regard to structure. After lessons about the concept of Manifest Destiny, I gave a short answer question and simply asked the students to re-describe it in a loose essay structure. What I was looking for here was a baseline of work to gauge what work, if any, might needed to be done with regard to comprehension and writing through the semester. It wasn't specifically a needs assessment for an A.R., although writing, among other things, was on my radar. The results were somewhat eye-opening, as well as a bit deceiving at first glance, for me. What it appeared was that a wide swath of my student fell under highly different abilities in content knowledge and/or writing that could convey that information. Further, despite projects that appeared to show that they had understood the content, many had trouble actually putting this content into a meaningful composition. Here seemed to a place where I could look at starting to focusing my AR.
The more I thought about specific incidences where I would see a big difference between the students knowledge and their essay and written work, and that that writing was often confused and unstructured, the more I felt I could really help these students move forward. The question was how?
Initially, I had thought I might start to aim at strategies that might help improve this important part of the writing process and began to formulate other needs assessments and ways of implementing a strategy. My first thought, and after some peer and supervisory conferencing, was that I may be able to directly address the various aspects that they seemed to be struggling with. Something was pulling at the back of my mind, with the initial baseline, though. I gave that lesson and then gave them yet another essay, as a further needs assessment. This time, I gave them clear directions for including a thesis, three body paragraphs with supports, and a concluding statement. I modeled a thesis, topics that could go into body paragraphs and reviewed what a conclusion would and would not normally include. I took these essays and applied a rubric I had made to gauge the different aspects of the paper in order to determine individual and class-wide strengths and challenges. The following rubric enabled me to specifically look at the writing skills and content knowledge they were able to convey in the structure format. I then took the information and created a graph illustrating the totals for each category (structure, critical analysis, etc.) and score for all students who participated. Finally, I calculated a mean average for each category.
This assignment, and the examination of it both in reading and breaking down the figures, gave me a lot of insight and good general feel for both the individuals in my class as well as where the class was on the whole. Total number of students that took part in the needs assessment was 29.
The results showed and seemed to indicate the following:
- I have a small number of students who are proficient in all of the categories.
- I also have a small number who show a high level of challenge in their ability to write and those few fell into almost all categories.
- By and large most of my students scored in the 3 range for all categories which tells me that while they showed some ability in each of the categories they are still two points removed from what would be considered an 'A' grade in each.
- The Critical Analysis category showed the smallest gap between scores while concurrently showing the fewest number of 5 scores, possibly illustrating that the Critical Analysis and Content knowledge aspect of the assignment may be more of a challenge for more students.
- Ultimately what this shows me is some of the areas that could be addressed and that the majority of my students have room for improvement.
How do my students feel about writing?
I had obtained a baseline writing example, but I began to wonder about how the students actually felt about writing themselves and if this might have an impact on the previous results I had gotten from the examination of their assignment. How comfortable are my students with writing? Were there some aspects that they themselves felt were easier or hard to work on in class? What did they think that perception had on how they wrote or the grades they got on writing in general? To that end I asked them to fill out a survey that combined a Likert scale question about how they personally felt about writing as well as three open ended questions that I hoped might give me further insight into their feeling and perceptions about what we as teachers have been asking them to do.
The results from the Likert question for how they felt about the writing process were intriguing. Five students listed very uncomfortable, four as uncomfortable and only three responded that they felt very comfortable while the rest, the vast majority circled that they were comfortable with the process.
Easiest:
1. Understanding content
2. Writing an introduction and conclusion
3. Getting started
Hardest:
1. Writing a thesis
2. Making meaning of what they know on paper
3. Body organization- know what to use and how to support their ideas.
The third question asked if they had ever asked a peer/friend to check their work . This answer was split fairly evenly between 'yes' and 'no'. Interestingly, many of the 'no' answers listed something like 'no because they don't care" or "only if it is assigned because then they will actually DO IT to help".
Moving towards Action Research
As I contemplate all of the work I have done with my students on a daily basis, as well as the information that I had intentionally sought out through the various needs assessments, I feel like I have discovered some larger patterns that could lead me forward in the questions I want to look at further.
With the way that school and the history classes are moving towards a greater focus on skill-sets and writing, I believe there may be an opportunity to look at strategies that would address some of the challenges they face.
I see that many of my students have differing abilities. Some students are at the higher and lower levels of ability, however, most are in the middle. Even with respect to their own perceptions of comfortability they list themselves at the mid-level of 3. They share some of the same struggles and have self reported that they also share some of the same strengths and challenges. The common response to a writing assignment is a collective groan. As I have taught and watched my students go through the efforts of learning then writing I have seen them try and grapple with a myriad of different difficulties. Where some struggle to still understand what the thesis sentence is, others wrestle with connections they would like to make, ever so light in connectivity, might work to prove their point with weak support. Even more, it appears that some of the ability difference may very well exacerbate the whole class ability to move forward. Those that are ahead become annoyed at waiting for those who are taking more time, while those that are behind, are too embarassed, possibly because of natural class dynamics, to do anything but give up and act like they don't care.
A Collaborative Writing Project
I wondered if it would be possible to leverage the very tools that students and teachers are already familiar with, things like pair share, group work, student lead learning, jigsaw, and the like -. that we often utilize to collective their knowledge and ability to push each other further through discussion and collaboration towards increasing student ability to improve on all of the aspects of learning and writing?
Almost all of my students struggled with in class writing assignments.
The main question guiding my Action Research is:
1. How does student peer collaboration in writing impact students' attitudes and learning in an 11th grade history class?
Other questions that will guide my Action Research and that I would like to explore:
2. How does collaborative writing work impact student content retention?
3. How will participating in peer review and work affects student motivation?
4. How does collaboration affect student quality of work?
As I contemplate all of the work I have done with my students on a daily basis, as well as the information that I had intentionally sought out through the various needs assessments, I feel like I have discovered some larger patterns that could lead me forward in the questions I want to look at further.
With the way that school and the history classes are moving towards a greater focus on skill-sets and writing, I believe there may be an opportunity to look at strategies that would address some of the challenges they face.
I see that many of my students have differing abilities. Some students are at the higher and lower levels of ability, however, most are in the middle. Even with respect to their own perceptions of comfortability they list themselves at the mid-level of 3. They share some of the same struggles and have self reported that they also share some of the same strengths and challenges. The common response to a writing assignment is a collective groan. As I have taught and watched my students go through the efforts of learning then writing I have seen them try and grapple with a myriad of different difficulties. Where some struggle to still understand what the thesis sentence is, others wrestle with connections they would like to make, ever so light in connectivity, might work to prove their point with weak support. Even more, it appears that some of the ability difference may very well exacerbate the whole class ability to move forward. Those that are ahead become annoyed at waiting for those who are taking more time, while those that are behind, are too embarassed, possibly because of natural class dynamics, to do anything but give up and act like they don't care.
A Collaborative Writing Project
I wondered if it would be possible to leverage the very tools that students and teachers are already familiar with, things like pair share, group work, student lead learning, jigsaw, and the like -. that we often utilize to collective their knowledge and ability to push each other further through discussion and collaboration towards increasing student ability to improve on all of the aspects of learning and writing?
Almost all of my students struggled with in class writing assignments.
The main question guiding my Action Research is:
1. How does student peer collaboration in writing impact students' attitudes and learning in an 11th grade history class?
Other questions that will guide my Action Research and that I would like to explore:
2. How does collaborative writing work impact student content retention?
3. How will participating in peer review and work affects student motivation?
4. How does collaboration affect student quality of work?