Action+Research+(For+Teachers)

My Wiki Journey
 * ~ **__First Steps__**

My first step with my wiki space was creating a topic page. I spent hours teaching myself to use the wiki and was grateful to my past experience making a website as many of the things I had learned doing that helped me with my wiki. Many difficulties I have observed people having with their wiki spaces have related back to not putting their pictures, videos and text in a table to separate and organize these. Once I had made the site I had to work out how to use it to get the most out of the work I had done and manage the site in class. Initially I used the site merely as additional information to the topic books and objects the students had on the topic table. ||~ My first page ||
 * ~ **__Management__**

I have two computers in my classroom and decided to introduce the wiki first to my top reading group during my third year students posting. The group was to complete different tasks directed by me. As such a large group was using the two computers they had to rotate tasks. Four students alternated on the computer so had one day on and one day off. The students who were on the computer were told which task to complete that day as were the non-computer group, they then swapped the next day. I was able to manage this as this was my only reading group at the time, the students needed a lot of support to complete both the computer and non-computer tasks and it relied a lot on me setting things up.

I knew that this would not work after my student had left and was not taking the rest of the class while I worked with my group. However it did help to train the children to use the wiki so they would be able to teach the other children. I was also able to establish strict systems and routines. I bought headphones and dual adapter plugs so two children could be on the wiki at once and the noise from the videos did not disturb the rest of the class.

The children were to ask 3 before me, if their partners and the other people in the reading group could not solve their problem they would place a 'help' poster over the screen of the computer, the students also did this if they came across anything on the web accidentally that made them uncomfortable. They were only allowed to interrupt me once I was finished with my groups or working with other children. If they had to wait for a while they were to continue with non-computer work. Because of the nature of relying on technology I realized that having non-computer activities prepared is essential to the success of managing some students on the computer and others doing different tasks and because I only had the two computers both I had huge problems with all year. ||~ The Rules

Second page

Resources for classroom management

 ||
 * ~ **__Extending the Idea__**


 * How can I support the independent inquiry process and cater for individual learning styles in my classroom?**

This lead me to the next step of my journey. I had been learning about [|Inquiry Learning] and liked the idea of the students having some control over what they learn about within a structure that I had set up. So I decided to set up contract sheets, where children had some choice within the structure I had planned.

During the Magnets topic I had a reading contract sheet, I had worked with these students and therefore told them what they were to work on each day, giving out the computer and non-computer activity. If I was to let the students have control they would need some support to do this, so I made the help page, this has continued to grow so the children can independently answer their questions when they do not understand a task. I found that all of the students were able to understand what I had set up on the wiki better than my usual explanation I think because much of the help page is visual and has many examples. The students were also much more inventive as they had such a variety of ideas to get them started.

During the Magnet topic when the students made a board game, was a good example of this. On the wiki I had provided a slideshow of board games using magnets that other children had made. In the past when I have asked children to make board games the quality of the end products is quite poor if they make these without close teacher direction and support. This was not the case with the board games the children made as the wiki had taken over my job of closely supporting them, giving direction and ideas.

I had parent interviews at that time and several parents had asked for various work for students who needed a little more practice on some concepts and I realized I could use the wiki for this also. I started on a Language page, the strength of this was that it saved me work and families were able to support students from home and also become familiar with what we were learning at school. This meant that the language used was consistent and the concepts covered were suitable for the students to use. There is a lot of potential for me to use the wiki for homework. At this stage as many families do not have broadband or computers and because I can not support the number of students in this situation at school I will wait until I have a few more computers in my classroom so I can support these students.

The maths page took me a lot longer to put together as it is more complicated and I need to cover many more concepts. I have not separated it out into groups yet but will do this next year just as the language page is.


 * A video planned by the Children to show future classes and other teachers how the routines in the classroom work.**

media type="custom" key="3179486" ||~ Reading Project to support Magnet page



Next topic

China reading project page

Help page

Language Page

Maths page ||
 * ~ **__The Children's Ideas__**

Later the children were working on their China projects. One of the frequent things they wanted to do was ask me questions during my group work. Most were very good at waiting but some were so engaged in their learning and focused on getting the answers they needed to complete their tasks they just barged into my group teaching. I didn't want to stifle this enthusiasm but they could not interrupt my teaching of reading groups. We discussed this as a group and the children made a list of all of the things they may possibly need to ask. Most were where places were, what things are and what words mean. So I created a question page where the children could answer these types of questions on their own with an online English and Maori dictionary, online encyclopedia wikipedia and google earth. This idea had come completely from working with the children. The class uses this page to solve many questions now, this page is the first place they go to as it is far more effective than asking me.

Next some of the children broke the classroom wiki rules by searching on the internet without my permission (I had taught them too well). They were looking for Ben 10, a popular character on tv. They had found a great game on cartoon network. The children who did this as per the rule were banned from the computers for the rest of the topic and had to do non-computer activities until it had finished. However we did come to a compromise that I would make a fun page that the students could use in their free choice times and with my permission we would search for appropriate sites to go on this page. This pages is developed completely at the request of the children. I set it up and put in the links but they decided what and if they want things added to it. ||~ Question page

Fun page ||
 * ~ __Action Research- Reflection Results__


 * How can I measure progress and success?**

For my action research I decided to look at reflection. Although I have always used some reflection activities in my classroom in a more informal way. I really have not given reflection enough emphasis in my classroom and I have never taught children specifically to reflect. I began by taking reflections from children during our magnet topic. At the end of the topic I asked the children to reflect on their experiences of working with a partner to complete the tasks. I used [|voicethread] to collect the children's reflections, unfortunately because of the internet connection at school I was unable to have the children reflect verbally. This had been my intention so I could remove the barrier of writing for these younger students so they would not be limited by their ability to express themselves in writing. As this wouldn't work, I decided to type their responses so they still had the ability to express their ideas and thinking freely, it turned out to be quite good for my own reflection and I was pleased to have this time to speak with each child. ||~ [|Voice thread]

Reflection Rubric- How I Measured the quality of the reflections || media type="custom" key="2013742" ||~ Magnets topic
 * ~ First reflection from Magnets Topic 

|| media type="custom" key="2014068"
 * ~ Second reflection from China Topic 

||~ China topic

|| media type="custom" key="2014044" ||~ Antarctica topic
 * ~ Final reflection for the year Antarctica Topic 

Antarctica Reading Project ||
 * __My Reflection__**
 * __My Reflection__**

I realize now how much I have underestimated the importance of **teaching** children to reflect and the power of reflection on their learning. As I have always taught younger students I have never seen self reflection as being a big part of the classroom programme. Reflective work to me seemed something which is quite sophisticated and usually involved diary writing type activities. Having made it a focus for my teaching I see now that it can be taught and understood by young children. Experiences and time to reflect should be in balance in the class. Most reflection I have done in the past has been informal and mostly centered on the children's feelings about an activity rather than focusing on learning. I now know that reflecting on feelings is a lower level reflection than reflecting on thinking and learning.

I learnt a great deal about prompting children to reflect and how to specifically teach reflection. The level of response was linked to my beginning question. The question I asked them to reflect on for the Magnets topic was more likely to evoke a feeling type response, because it was about working with others. However it was clear that the students had not had experiences reflecting on a specific question as their answers where at times unrelated to the question and focused on their personal experiences rather than conclusions they had drawn about learning with a partner.

I decided to have student reflect on the same question for China and Antarctica so I could really measure their ability to reflect on a specific question. If I had thought about how I was going to measure the reflections earlier on I would have really thought about how it might be if students gave a reflection at each stage.

Children's reflection as a part of my evaluation. It has amazed me the deeper realizations I have had about my own teaching and effectiveness when thinking about the learning from the children's perspective. Although I have always had some information about how the learning has been for the children it has never been so formalized. I have never sat and spoke with children one-on-one and asked them about how they found my teaching. I have always used a class assessment and often have tried to rip around the class and speak to each child about a concept I wanted them to learn but have not had conversations about learning itself. The information for me about how my students learn best has been the most helpful information to inform my future teaching. ||~  || I will continue to use both reflection and the wiki in my classroom. My entire programme really centres around our wiki site now and I can't really imagine what I would do without it. In the future I will design reflection questions which encourage students to critically evaluate their decisions and plan for their own next steps. I think I prevented them from scoring 5 as I did not have questions which made this easy to do. I have thought about giving them the criteria to score their own reflections. At this stage I think I would like to leave reflection as a personal response which is not compared and judged by themselves and others. It is purely for me to measure my effectiveness and for the students to communicate with me.
 * ~ **__Where to next?...__**

I have created a page for friends and whanau (family) to contact the children. I would like to advertise this to parents and show them at the 'Meet the teacher' evening next year what they can do to contribute to our wikispace, this year I was only beginning my journey and although I have sent letters home explaining this I think a demonstration would encourage parents to do this.

I would also like to begin to use the discussion boards in other places, perhaps for the students to post any questions they have and where others can post answers or thoughts.

Other teachers at my school are also interested in creating a wiki so linking up with other classes and collaborating together will also be a next step. I have opened the wiki up to the world and put us on a education wiki examples wiki so hopefully we will start seeing some hits from other teachers and classes around the world.

I have loved using voicethread but would like to experiment with [|yackpack] to facilitate discussions with the class as I extend the use of the wiki for whole class use next year.

Learning intentions... For a long time I have felt uncomfortable about giving students the learning intention and looking for their understanding in the things they can parrot back at the end of a lesson. I have seen this model used a lot especially overseas where it is very strong as it suits the whole class teaching model and prescriptive curriculum well. I do agree that learning should not be a mystery and that the learning experience should link directly to the needs of students. It seems that by telling students what they are learning we are not giving them a chance to do the thinking. I have been experimenting with this format when teaching in class by giving a key question for students to think about, rather than a learning intention. Then as a group/ class we commence the learning experience and reflect on the question throughout the process. At the end of the lesson I return to the question and sometimes but not every time we write a list of advice or things to remember or think about in answer to the question.

Example question might be- Why do question marks exist? Why do we need to be able to tell the time? How can we get people to keep reading our stories?

So far this has been far more enjoyable for me as a teacher and the children in my opinion are working far more successfully. I would like to experiment with this idea next year. I am getting a permanently mounted projector in my room next year. I have seen a lot of people use projecting tools and interactive whiteboards to lecture to a learning intention and I would like to see if I could use this tool to follow a question/ reflection lesson model.

The revelation which has had the most impact on me and my teaching has been the importance of having a thinking classroom, thinking time is reflection and evaluation time. This time should be equal to the time devoted to a task and should be throughout the learning experience, this is actually when all of the learning happens. If we don't make time for this then all of your efforts in the learning experience are lost, the children actually learn very little that they can use again. All of the work we have done all year has developed and grown skills and understandings about how to think and learn. I realize now that teaching children to reflect means that they never stop learning outside of school either as they start to realize that everything they experience can be something they learn from. I feel that I am better preparing them for the real world this way, in life people don't tell you what you will learn before you have an experience. I don't think that students learn to do this if we tell them what they will learn all of the time. Often the students have talked about things they have learnt that I didn't think of. In fact I am learning more than I ever have before. I think a focused inquiry into the concept you are trying to teach is a far more powerful way of making learning explicit without doing all of the work for the students. If we are really going to get the most out of having an inquiring classroom it should not be limited to topic and reading work. ||~  ||