Module 10 - Create a Blog Detailing Key Analysis and Action Research Project

Hello! This blog is a story of a graduate student's journey through a Curriculum and Instructional Design for Diversity class which is part of an educational doctoral program. For the last 10 weeks we have been exploring effective lesson planning, needs of diverse learners and implementation of effective multimodal instructional methods. Let me start with an infographic that summarizes some of the key ideas from this class. 

Now, travel back in time with me to see how I got to this point. This blog will be in reverse chronological order, so please go the end if you want to start at the beginning. 

Here are some of the key findings from my action research project: 

The reading this week was a mixed bag of expectations, technology, and authentic learning. The video presentations were reflections on outcomes and multimodal strategies. Starting a blog was my technological hurdle. After messing around with Wix.com for way too long, I finally reverted back to what I know. Having kept up a quilting blog for the last 17 years, I am familiar with BlogSpot and new that it would be easy and quick to publish a blog here. This blog should cover key findings from the action research project that we completed in this class along with:

• student centered instructional methods
• diverse learner strategies
• teacher perceptions
• classroom management techniques
• lesson planning development strategies

Module 9 - Create and Share an Action Research Presentation

This week we put everything together to make a video explaining our action research project. After experimenting (and struggling) with several technology options, I ended up using Canva to make a video presentation which explained the key aspects of my project. Powtoons is absolutely adorable, and I spent most of Thanksgiving playing around with it. The limit of 3 minutes though, without a paid subscription was a deal breaker for me. The video summarizes the key aspects of the action research project which included both the survey results and key advice from the interview. 

The video presentations this week discussed quantitative and qualitative research as instructional strategies for diverse learners

Module 8 - Effective Student Centered Instructional Strategies

 The assignment this week was a qualitative interview with a teacher of diverse background. We lack a diversity of teachers on our campus. Which led me to seek out a teacher who had experience with diverse students. The teacher who took over my AP Biology classes when I left the classroom three years ago came to us from an overseas teaching assignment with a Department of Defense school in Dubai. Before that she taught in Shanghai. I leaned on her experience with culturally diverse students to gain some insight on classroom management in rigorous instruction. She is known for holding extremely high expectations for her students while running a highly engaged classroom. I was glad to have time to catch up with her and talk about strategies that I could share with our new teachers.

She relies heavily on constant movement within and interaction with students to help them stay on task and on the right track. She shared some great tips that will really help our new teachers to improve classroom management. This is an area of focus for our new teachers. As leaders and mentors in the new teacher induction program, we are both helping to support the ever growing list of new teachers at our school. Here are some of the key ideas that she shared: 

Reading this week focused on student engagement. The videos were about critiquing resources and engagement and rigor.

Module 7 -Managing the Learning Environmen

Classroom management was the theme for this week. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart as the lead mentor at our school. We have an abundance of new teachers and an increasing number who are entering the field with no formal training in education or pedagogy. I was able to create some infographics that could be used with these new teachers. 

Reading this week focused on classroom management as it relates to diverse learners and integrated curriculum. The video presentations talked about the balance of structure and flexibility and differentiated classroom management

Module 6 - Integrated Curriculum

 

This week we worked on Taking the previous lesson and integrating it to include multiple subject areas. I continued to work with my initial lesson plan theme of energy, but expanded to include social studies, math and language arts components while being tied together with the theme of Popcorn! 

I added some helpful tips for teachers who might want to work on an integrated unit of their own. 

Reading this week focused on students with special needs. Videos covered integrated instruction and evaluation frameworks.

Module 5 - Action Research: Analyzing Data, Presenting Results, and Planning Design

This week, with my new knowledge of WAC, diverse learner needs and effective lesson planning strategies, I finished collecting data for my action research project. I did some simple calculations  and made some graphs to get a better idea of the insight that could be gathered from the survey responses. 

I saw a fairly widespread use of multimodal strategies by experienced teachers at my school. 

 

I also found the most commonly used methods for these teachers. I think that the results would have been different if I had surveyed teachers from different subject areas such as science, art or physical education. 

Reading this week focused on action research with more articles on culturally responsive teaching and diverse learners. Video presentations this week talked about analyzing action research and interviewing

Module 4 - Multimodal Instructional Practice

This week we designed a survey about multimodal learning strategies to give to teachers at our school. I started targeting a few teachers that I knew would be willing to do a quick survey for me. I try to be careful about asking people to do favors for me. I am no longer a classroom teacher. I don't want to make people feel obligated to do things for me. I was glad to see that the survey didn't have to be excessively long or have that many participants, so I was able to just ask teachers who I know on a more personal level. This did mean that most of my survey participants are veteran teachers. 

 Action research is a flexible approach to that lets teachers improve their instruction by gathering and analyzing data. I designed a survey that could be used to gather data about which instructional methods teachers at my school use. It included both quantitative data in the form of Likert scale questions as well as open ended questions for more qualitative data. Then I wrote a research proposal explaining my plan and how I would implement this survey.

Our readings this week focused on Culturally responsive teaching and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The videos were about evaluating action research and evidence based multimodal instruction

Module 3 - Benefits of Writing Across the Curriculum

This week we took the new information that we learned last week about the needs of specific groups of learners and applied it to our lesson plan to add writing across the curriculum. Adding specific strategies to help each group and integrating the lesson plan to include several subject areas added a new depth to our original lesson plans. I had a lot of fun finding literature to reflect diverse cultural groups and had to think carefully about how to represent many backgrounds of my students. Books are tricky in Florida right now, so to add anything to a classroom library I would need to do a lot of approval and notification. Our language arts teachers are sticking to the textbook for the most part right now. 

Our readings this week focused on Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) . In the video presentations we learned about planning an interdisciplinary unit and culturally relevant instruction

Module 2 - Identifying Diverse Learners’ Needs: Learner Strategies

This week we looked at the needs of diverse groups of student learners that are present in our classrooms. I found peer reviewed journal articles about academic outcome disparities and specific needs for each of these groups. My school does not do a great job at representing the diversity of our surrounding area. We are a "public school of choice" and accept students via a random lottery of all applicants. The applicant pool is he problem. Because we do not provide transportation, the potential student population is limited to students with parents who can get them back and forth every day until they are old enough to drive themselves. I did come up with three groups of student that are common here and found some good articles about learner outcomes and needs. 

Our readings this week were about different groups of learners and how to meet their unique needs. We lack many types of diversity at my school, but I tried to find relevant groups who exist here. 

The video presentations went over characteristics of diverse students and culturally relevant instruction

Module 1 - Effective Lesson Development Strategies for Rigorous Instruction

This week we found 5 different systematic reviews of meta-analyses. We evaluated each of these studies using the AMSTAR which is a tool that can be used to create a quantitative ranking of the quality of these papers. We were tasked with evaluating which factors most impacted diverse student learning and which predicted students success. 

These are the 5 articles I found: 

And this is the AMSTAR Chart for these articles:

	study 1	study 2	study 3	study 4	study 5
1. Clearly Stated Objectives	0	0	1	1	1
2. Comprehensive Literature Search	0.5	1	1	1	1
3. Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria	1	1	1	1	1
4. Information Sources	0	1	1	1	1
5. Details of the Search	1	1	1	1	1
6. Selection of Studies	1	1	1	1	1
7. Data Collection	1	1	1	1	1
8. Appraisal of Study Quality	1	1	1	1	1
9. Data Synthesis	1	1	1	1	1
10. Risk of Bias	1	1	0	0	0
11. Publication Bias	0	0	0	1	1
12. Meta-Analytical Methods	0	1	0	1	1
13. Summary of Evidence	1	1	1	1	1
14. Strength of the Evidence	0	1	1	1	1
15. Applicability of the Results	1	0	0	1	1
16. Conflicts of Interest	1	0	0	0	0
total	10.5	12	11	14	14
rank	4	2	3	1	1

I was not able to get a subscription to the AMSTAR tool, and so devised my own system with 1 being assigned to studies that met criteria, 5 for partial, and 0 for studies which did not meet the criteria.  

Based on the results of this analysis, the most highly rated systematic review provided data supporting the use of 5E lesson planning. This has been a popular lesson planning strategy that my district has supported through professional development. It offers a lot flexibility which I think will help to meet the needs of diverse student groups. 

 I used this information to create a 5E lesson plan about energy which could be used in a middle school science classroom. There was a lot of detail to include in the lesson plan and research based data to support the instructional design choices. I can't imagine including citations in lesson plans on a regular basis, but it was fun to find out which methods are supported by data.