For my inquiry project, I will be observing the collaboration and participation that occurs in class while my students are seated in various arrangements. Because my current student teaching position is in a school that emphasizes student collaboration in learning, I hope that this exploration will shed some light on best ways to encourage collaboration and participation by students in ways that make them most comfortable. In order to implement any changes to the physical arrangement of my classroom, I wanted to establish a sense of what my students are feeling about themselves as a learner, how they would like the classroom to be arranged, and what they believe good student participation looks. As a warm-up this week, students were asked to complete the following survey to share their opinions: As I reviewed the responses from my Algebra 2 class of tenth and eleventh graders, there were some patterns that I somewhat expected but also a few things that I did not expect to see. In terms of student learning style, I received the majority of responses with visual and hands-on learning in the top two spots with auditory learning ranked third. This response was not much of a surprise to me, and based on the explanations I can understand why the students felt that auditory was their last choice. Most students noted that with visual or hands-on learning, they are able to see the process at work and experiment with it on their own. I found that my response to this question would be the same as a student. I enjoy seeing examples of how something is done as well as some hands-on manipulation in order to see it at work if possible. This is very informative for my practice for the rest of this year and for future groups of students. While this pattern will not always hold true, I now know for the rest of the year to give my students more visual and exploratory learning opportunities in order to promote their success. The next two questions asked students about their ideal classroom layout and to rank a list of possible arrangements from their favorite to their least favorite. There was definitely a large range of responses, but something that stood out as somewhat as a surprise to me was that a few students were actually advocates for an arrangement of individual seats in rows. This really surprised me coming from students who actively applied to a school that emphasizes collaborations in all classrooms. I always thought that students would want to sit with a partner or in groups, so it was very interesting to see those who preferred independent, individual learning instead. While these responses for individual seats in rows existed, there were also quite a few responses that stated “anything but rows.” This was more of the response I had expected from my students, as well as the opinion of my classroom mentor when I asked her to weigh in on the seating arrangement in the classroom. I plan to synthesize the students’ ranking of seating arrangements as best as I can in order to dive further into my exploration. I think the question that I was most interested to see the responses for was “what does good participation by a student look like?” I wanted to ask my students this question at the beginning of my inquiry in order to provide myself with some type of baseline to see how my students either participate or not in a way that they define participation. I consider defining participation for myself in this inquiry and based my observations on this one idea that I had, but I realized that not all students would be able to meet that one standard. By having students create their own definition, I can monitor their involvement in class on a more individualized level. It was interesting to read how some students defined good participation in a way that they act or in some cases do not act in class. I am also very interested to see if this survey has any influence on the way students participate in the future. In the final two pages of the survey, students were given four different options of seating arrangements. They were asked to place an X in the square to represent the desk that they would most like to sit in. I did not see any real observable pattern to the placement of students. Several seemed to select seats either in the back of the classroom or up in the front row. There were some that selected seats in the center of the classroom, but there was definitely a wide variety of responses to this question. I am hoping to also synthesize this data in a way that can inform the way students are individually seated in the various arrangements. Student #1Student #2Student #3
1 Comment
Sarah Poncz
2/7/2016 03:21:59 pm
Good way to dive into your inquiry topic.
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Author20 something year old. Pittsburgh native. Pennsylvania explorer. Graduate student. Aspiring teacher. Archives
March 2016
Categories |