Skip to main content

Action Research

Research! The thought of research brings to mind hours of pouring over academic literature, the onerous task of collecting data, plotting it into absurdly complicated cluster/bar graphs and analysis. For the next 8 weeks, I will be learning how to undertake an action research. I tried it once before. But I don't think it was a success. I felt no sense of accomplishment. I got lost in the process. And worst of all, I changed my mind about my wondering half way through the process!






The first thing I learnt this week is to look at this process more as an inquiry than a research. This knowledge was soothing. I have been teaching through inquiry. The only difference is that the spot light is on me and my learning, not the students. The whole purpose of AR is of course to improve student learning. It also gives voice to the otherwise neglected teachers who rely on outsiders, scientists and university professors who have spent years thinking about something connected with education, quite objectively. AR or Inquiry Research  is more subjective.

The second thing I learnt is that my "wonderings" have to be absolutely spot on. They need to be clear, concise and must capture my "nagging thoughts" in a way that allows me to tackle them in a systematic manner. It has to be be within a specific time frame, otherwise it can go on and on and come to nothing.

So these are my wonderings:


How can I encourage my students to think critically and incorporate this into their classroom discussions?
How can I improve reading fluency and comprehension skills of my ESL students?

How can I help my students become more proficient at solving math word problems?

I will have to decide on any one of these.


Fingers crossed :)



Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification    Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification".  Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts.  Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes  based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...
Post a Comment
Read more

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy)  is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt.  In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting  and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...
Post a Comment
Read more

8 Strategies to Overcome Math Anxiety in the Classroom

  Have you ever considered what math anxiety may look like in your classroom? As I prepare to begin my lesson, handing out notebooks or math prompts, I look around and observe my students. As the lesson progresses, I continue to look around and monitor their behaviour. Are there some students who take time to settle down or start to talk about  things completely unrelated to math? Does one student ask to go the washroom? Or maybe complain about a stomachache or a headache? Is there a student who may start crying or become angry and indulge in negative self talk? "I am dumb." or "I can never get this right!" and so on and so forth. The more subtle symptoms : Is a student being being extra chatty, taking time to settle down, obsessing about the answer, refusing to answer questions, seldom asking for help, hurtling through work or showing a reluctance to work with others.  A broad categories these symptoms would look like this: cognitive difficulties emotional distress...
Post a Comment
Read more