My initial research plan...

The following is an excerpt from my initial research plan. I'm posting it here because I think it can be valuable to gain more insight into what I'm trying to learn about my classroom. I also think that the background information will be important in keeping my research and my practice grounded in solid evidence. It's quite long, but here it is.

"Background Information

            Reflection and inquiry are imperative forces that drive an educator’s understandings about their students, their teaching practices, and their personal identity as a teacher. As of June 2013, I have officially completed my first year as an intensive reading teacher in an urban public middle school in Duval County, FL. My process of teacher inquiry and the construction of an action research project for my classroom are based upon the reflections I have gathered from the past year combined with new knowledge encountered through independent professional development and coursework.

            In the 2012-2013 school year, I taught intensive reading in grades 6 and 7. My classes consisted of approximately 20 students who were scheduled to my class every day for a 90 minute class period. The racial backgrounds of my classes were 83% African American, 8% Hispanic, and 8% White. As an entire school (calculated in June of 2012), 59% of students were African American, 9% were Hispanic, 5% were of mixed race, 3% were Asian, and 24% were white. All of my students came from a background of poverty, measured by all students qualifying for free/reduced lunch. As of 2012, approximately 77% of the entire student body lived in poverty. Students were mandated to be scheduled into my class because they scored a level 1 on their 2012 FCAT in reading.

            While reflecting upon the school year and planning for the upcoming year, the process of teacher inquiry has served as a powerful lens of personal examination. I began my course of reflection by considering my most crucial challenges of the school year that are ripe with potential for inquiry. At the beginning of the school year, I drafted a vision for my classroom that detailed goals for myself and my students and outlined the major traits we needed to foster in order to accomplish these goals. I realized that my classroom experience did not translate into the vision I created for the school year in a variety of ways.

            Throughout the course of the year, I struggled with challenging behaviors that my students exhibited on a daily basis in my classroom. It appeared that each class became dominated by certain types of behaviors that challenged me to continually try out different methods and seek new solutions. As an educator, I recognize that each child is an individual with immense power, and we have the ability to shape the educational experience of this child forever. While studying various incidents and challenges posed by individual students, I came to realize that each scenario held true to a common thread. Most of the challenges posed by students in my classroom were related to low levels of engagement in reading. As stated by Dana and Yendol-Hoppey (2009), there is often a common theme that connects our fascinations about our teaching practice. Throughout the course, I realized that my students often exhibited low levels of engagement in the reading process measured by their independent reading practice, active reading in class exercises, and their interest levels shown. Each incident I reflected upon could have potentially never occurred or could have been improved based on the students’ level of engagement in literacy.  

            Reflecting upon the past school year, I noticed that I rarely gave my students opportunities to work collaboratively in groups or partners. Based upon my current knowledge, I know that my students would have highly benefitted from these strategies in the classroom. During the school year I noticed through observation that my students were intensely talkative and had a real desire to talk about what they were working on or learning about. The majority of my students came from a cultural background that values collectivism, yet all year I had pushed my students to become more individualistic in many ways. For example, through my frequent insistence on demonstrating knowledge independently, I inadvertently discouraged students from utilizing their cultural assets in the classroom. This communicated a message to students that I did not understand or value their cultural background. Also, I could have engaged students through group literacy strategies such as shared reading and collaborative projects. Students showed interest in holding classroom discussions, and I incorporated a Socratic Seminar at the end of the year which demonstrated the great potential of this strategy in my classroom. In order to engage students in literacy, students need to feel that their culture is valued and teachers need to use strategies and techniques to incorporate these cultural assets.  

            Another major area that I reflected upon from the past year was the context of my classroom. My students came into my class on the first day expressing how disappointed they were to have been placed in intensive reading. In my school community, there is a negative perception of the class and the students that are enrolled in it. Throughout the year, my students would explain to me that their other teachers made judgments about their intelligence based on their placement in the class. These attitudes have demonstrated that it will be essential to flip the script on how it feels to be in reading class and dramatically alter my students affect for reading.

            Also, in relation to the context of my school, I observed my students engagement levels in reading drop significantly during the time period of FCAT preparation. Last year, I was unaware of how the cultural differences between my students and I affected the learning process. During this time, I could have used culturally relevant strategies to help prepare students for FCAT success and also to balance out the intense preparation that occurred. Utilizing these strategies would have increased my students’ engagement and could have created a more accessible learning environment. According to Dana & Yendol-Hoppey (2009), “Many teachers in states where pressure from high-stakes testing seems to dominate the culture of the district and schools wonder, ‘How can we make learning relevant and motivating in a context where testing seems to dominate curriculum and scheduling?’” (p. 55). This statement summarizes my thinking upon reflection on the FCAT preparation in my classroom last year.

Literature Related To My Topic

While exploring and reflecting upon my teaching practice, I have determined that the most crucial areas for development are related to the creation and implementation of culturally responsive teaching strategies. If I explore and improve my practice in the realm of classroom culture and responsive teaching strategies, other challenges I have experienced such as classroom management and behaviors should be relieved. Many of my challenges I have experienced in my classroom lead back to a common thread of classroom culture and teaching strategies. I need to be able to utilize my students cultural assets as crucial pillars on which I can build instruction and teaching.

The majority of my students come from a background that celebrates a collectivist culture. Collectivist value systems emphasize interdependence, interpersonal social relationships, community and family roles, proximal modes of communication, cooperation, and place relationships over substance in conversation (Tileston & Darling, 2008, p. 32). This information illustrates the importance of changing my teaching practices to align with and respond to my students’ culture.

One teaching strategy that can be used to create a culturally responsive classroom for my students is the process of collaborative learning[1]. As previously stated, my students’ talkative nature is related to their collectivist cultural background. According to Brown (2003), “Recognizing this communication characteristic can help urban teachers develop instructional activities that build on these verbal interactions instead of being disrupted by them” (p. 281). This realization has led me to explore the process of collaboration in the classroom. Not only does the use of collaboration in the classroom facilitate student relationships, but it also has the potential to increase student achievement. The process of collaboration in the classroom has been noted to increase student achievement by as much as 28 points (Tileston & Darling, 2008, pg. 60).

The use of classroom discussion is a founding collaborative tool that can be used to facilitate student learning. Discussion can take many forms in the classroom and can be structured formally or informally. However, this strategy has the power to harness the best in my students, especially considering my students cultural collectivist background. Hadjioannou (2007) studied a Florida classroom in which discussion was highly valued by the teacher and students as an instructional tool. In this classroom, Hadjioannou (2007) witnesses a classroom where, “participants were doubtlessly more likely to take substantial social risks, offer tentative contributions, and state controversial opinions” (p. 385). In a supportive and nurturing classroom environment, the use of discussion increases students’ engagement and participation in formulating new knowledge. Discussion is collaborative in nature, as Hadjioannou (2007) notes, “the classroom participants often engaged in verbal behavior that acknowledged other participants, complimented their knowledge and their contributions, or assisted them in making their contributions more complete and effective” (p. 393). Therefore, the use of classroom discussion incorporates students’ cultural values and pushes them to work collaboratively to further understand and construct their own meaning from classroom learning.

However, students must be taught strategies and methods for engaging in classroom discussions with clear expectations. Reading and literacy are social processes that have a certain set of academic norms for participation. Daniels (2011) states that, “If they do not know how to engage with an academic discipline, they lose their ability to control their own participation because they are not able to do what their teachers ask or expect” (p. 3). Students need social strategies for participating in reading, and the process of teaching collaborative discussions can facilitate the acquisition of these strategies. When students have learned strategies necessary to participate in reading and literacy in positive ways, they are much more likely to be engaged in a reading classroom.

Aside from classroom discussions, students can work collaboratively throughout the learning process. Collaborative learning involves the process of students working together in a group to achieve various academic goals. Completing academic work and achieving learning goals as a collective classroom group also assists with the creation of a culturally responsive classroom. As students work together, they gain new understandings about the material and become more engaged because they are working within their own cultural value system.

Collaborative learning also leads to higher achievement and gains in reading comprehension for struggling readers. According to a study by Edmonds et al. (2009), “On a standardized measure of comprehension, cooperative grouping was the more effective model,” and “The effects of reciprocal teaching on comprehension were moderate to high” (p. 289). Various methods of cooperative work can lead to student achievement through increased social engagement in the learning process.  Cooperative learning also improves students’ higher order thinking skills, learning gains, and general engagement in and affect towards school. Based on a variety of studies conducted, students working in a collaborative rather than individualistic or competitive environment show increased long-term retention, increased intrinsic motivation, higher expectations for success, increased creative thinking, and display positive attitudes towards school and the task at hand (Johnson & Johnson, 2009, p. 371).

The process of reciprocal teaching has the potential to greatly increase student achievement in reading and boost student self-efficacy in the academic environment. Reciprocal teaching is a collaborative learning strategy where students work in groups to read a passage together, while students take the roles of predictor, clarifier, summarizer, and questioner. Students share the task of utilizing the reading strategies associated with these names to gain crucial strategy practice and gain a higher level of understanding from a text. Reciprocal teaching also gives teachers a great opportunity to provide scaffolding for students as they practice reading strategies. The teacher can become a mediator during group discussions and provide feedback to students tailored to the needs of each student or the whole group (Alfasi, 1998). Also, there are a variety of methods that can be used to highly engage kinesthetic and visual learners through the use of reciprocal teaching, especially hand gestures and props to represent reading strategies (Oczkus, 2010). Reciprocal teaching can serve as one of the most important methods of cooperative learning in my classroom throughout the inquiry process. Studies show that reciprocal teaching strategies have led to an improvement of 28 points in 4^th grade reading (Carter, 2011). Reciprocal teaching also fits into the developing definitions of literacy as a dynamic interaction between the reader and a text (Carter, 2011).

            As we move further into the 21^st century, our lives are continually becoming increasingly dominated by technology. Students in my reading class demonstrate major challenges in reading, yet text, email and absorb information from the internet quickly and prolifically. Adams (2012) writes that, “One way to address these new literacies – including virtual reality experiences, blogs and wikis, and online discussions – is to infuse them into classroom instruction” (pg. 8). This observation has led me to believe that technology is a literacy strength that my students possess that is a function of 21^st century culture. Throughout the process of creating a culturally relevant classroom, integration of technology into the literacy process is an important collaborative learning tool. Students can create online posts related to classroom literature, respond to other’s ideas, and communicate in a collaborative online classroom community as well.

            Students enrolled in intensive reading classes frequently become disengaged from school because they believe that they have no academic choice. Students also disengage from school because they believe that they lack the intelligence to be successful. These statements gathered from students in my classroom last year reflect the urgency with which my students need to become engaged in reading and hooked on the notion that they can be successful. When students view their peers as well as faculty engaged in avid reading, it can become the culture of a classroom and even an entire school building. Teachers can build a reading culture by creating a collaborative space to build on knowledge of literature. For example, students need to talk and interact with their peers about books they are reading as a means of increasing their engagement with literacy. In a study conducted on the reading culture at one middle school, Daniels and Steres (2008) noted that, “These students, plus many others, decided what books to read because they noticed what their peers were reading or because their teachers consistently exposed them to new titles” (pg. 8). Discussion and collaboration during the reading process leads to the formation of a reading culture. Also, students can learn about books that relate to their lives and reflect their own culture through the process of talking to their peers about books. "

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[1] Terms such as collaborative, collective, and cooperative learning are all used to refer to the general process of a group of students working together towards mastery of a set of academic goals in the classroom. No reference to a specific instructional program is intended.