action research, part one

So today was a long day. Today we started our new classes for the next two weeks-- Language and Literacy, and Action Research part one. It was also the first day that my cohort and I had to separate.... :) For the past two weeks, we've had the same classes with the same people, but today we broke into classes with just our authorization levels... (i.e., only the people who are getting authorized to teach elementary/middle school like myself were in a class together). We also adjusted to new professors and new assignments.

One of the things I love about the program are all of the teaching methods and "best practices" we learn. It might seem kind of funny that we spend some of our mornings drawing or journaling or doing literature circles or playing "common threads" games, but really, they're for a bigger purpose. I can't teach my students how to do these different things if I've never done them before! I'm definitely not spending $5,000 a semester just to play. Things have already started to get more difficult, such as our action research project we're about to begin.

Action research is a huge component of the MAT program at George Fox. Not only will I be spending two full semesters student teaching and developing lesson plans for language arts and social studies classrooms, but I will be conducting a year-long research project that has to do with some sort of classroom/student learning improvement. It's pretty awesome because not only is it a chance to discover something new that I may be able to implement in my own classroom, but it also provides a great resume building opportunity once the research has been completed and the results have been analyzed. I've decided to do my action research project on "Building Community in Diverse, Middle-School Classrooms." I want to study whether it's possible for students to build community and relationships with one another (similar to a cohort), when they are constantly moving to a new class every 50 minutes. It's easier to build relationships in elementary schools because the students are in their homeroom class all day, but building community in period classes has proven to be more difficult. So, I'm going to see a) whether it's possible, and b) if so, whether community-building in the classroom has any positive effect on a student's self-esteem and overall classroom participation.

But until then, I'm currently involved in an AR project with two of my cohort members studying differentiated instruction (how we can apply different teaching methods to different learning styles within the classroom, while not compromising standards and the integrity of the lesson). That project will be finished by the end of this week! And..... that's all for now. :)