Action Research

TASCTY (I never realized what a good acronym this blog has!) is about to take a turn that some of you, as if there is a vast readership out there, may find annoying.

As I was reading my latest assignment for my Foundations of Action Research course, the author suggested getting started on the writing early. Writing about my thoughts, feelings, biases, preconceived notions--basically just letting it all hang out--in order to ensure as much validity in my action research project as possible. As I was reading that, I mentally started fumbling for my pen and notebook: that's cool, I thought, I like writing and journaling, and this will be a good opportunity to get back to writing!

Then I realized I don't really own a notebook. Not one that is suitable for that kind of writing, anyway. I have a small notebook that contains lyrics and poetry, and another legal pad that has education association stuff, but I don't have anything like a journal. However, I do have a blog. And since many of my readers (again with the hyperbole!) are educators, it might be useful to post my thoughts here, and have a built in audience that might give me feedback and thoughts and such. And those of you who read this blog who aren't teachers are still intelligent, brilliant and beautiful, and I'd still value and cherish any input you gave. So in case you're wondering, I would love to have peer review and discussion around what I post here, and it will be valuable to the process of carrying out this action research process.

This past weekend I finally hammered out my lit review for the project, and after reading numerous articles that seemed to line up with what I'm trying to do, I settled on a focus for my project, which is also a working title: “Promoting Higher-Order Questioning Through Guided and Open Inquiry Projects”. It was pretty cool to look at the literature I read surrounding this topic and to have my Free-Form Friday process somewhat validated. It's been my belief for some time that students who are learning about what interests them will be more motivated to learn. It's also been my belief that students who formulate their own research questions will be more likely to be on task and invested in what they are learning about, thus learning more of things that are useful to them. This early realization (or, let's call it what it really is, bias), probably comes from my own experience as a student. Much of what my teachers tried to teach me when I wasn't interested went straight in one ear and out the other, but the things I pursued on my own became my passion. And the teachers who allowed some freedom in selecting topics of interest were the ones who saw me at my best. So when I ask students to think of what they are interested in, and then we'll figure out how it relates to science, I am not just trying to perform a trick. I'm trying to get at what really motivates them, to help build a foundation, a passion, upon which their further learning and understanding of the world can be built.

Over time, since I began having students do these projects six or seven years ago, I've come to understand a few more things:
-seventh grade students will often have much interest in factual, simple questions, such as "how many babies to pandas have", and "how long do pandas live?";
-seventh grade students' ideas of research is often copying and pasting information from websites or online resources;
-seventh grade students rarely have the first idea about how to get started on a research project, or to build an experiment, or to perform any sort of scientific inquiry on their own;
-seventh grade students have very little formalized understanding of how science is carried out, or what makes science "science";
-seventh grade students are not to blame for any of this.

My approach to the Free Form Friday projects has been, by-and-large, just that: free form. I started by having students just randomly choosing topics, often with very tenuous connections to actual science. The first thing I noticed was that most of the projects were of a reportage nature: telling the audience about the subject, but often not learning much new. I responded to that by adding a "topic sheet", where students, before embarking on a project, would need to identify a topic, the questions they were interested in answering about the topic, where they might find information, what type of presentation they would like to do, and how long they thought the project might take. This was somewhat helpful, and the projects began to show a little more focused. The next big innovations were a KWL sheet (what you KNOW about the topic, what you WANT to learn about the topic, and a follow-up of what you LEARNED about the topic) along with a weekly progress log that chronicles each week's progress, thoughts, and next steps in the project. These also showed some measured improvement, but not a shift in the landscape. There are still steps to be taken to improve this process.

What I am looking at doing to improve the student focus is this:
1) put the topic sheet, KWL, and progress log in a table format, that students can copy, fill out, and paste into both my and their electronic notebooks;
2) develop some guided inquiry activities for students to learn at the beginning of the year, and use a technique called "backwards faded scaffolding" to eventually wean the students off of my guidance in their inquiry, and toward open inquiry, where they develop the questions, the testing, and the answers;
3) have students learn about Bloom's Taxonomy at the beginning of the year, and develop some questions on all levels of the taxonomy in our early inquiry activities together so they have some understanding of different levels of cognition;
4) ask students to develop questions at higher cognitive levels in their projects as they go along. I have not yet figured out how this will be implemented, but it is something I am considering right now.

Right now this seems really attainable, and the project feels like it is coming together all on its own. And what is more, if it shows promise in my classroom, it feels like it could be readily adapted in other settings as well.

What do my educator/educated friends have to say? Am I still on your radar? It just seems natural to use the blog for this purpose, and draw on the collective wisdom.