After reviewing my internship plan, studying this week’s readings, and viewing the interview videos, I came up with three possible research topics.
1) Curriculum Development: How can I build my own knowledge about literacy across different disciplines? In what ways can my school implement a cross curricular literacy plan to develop literacy skills for our students?
2) Community/Culture Building: How can implementing teacher-lead family groups (a group of 12-15 multi-grade-level students assigned to a specific teacher) help students with their sense of belonging, motivation, organization, behavior, involvement, career investigating, study skills, social skills and overall success while at CJH?
3) Staff Development: How does the process of self-assessment help teachers develop their individual professional development plans? How can I help facilitate the self-assessment process?
I met with my site supervisor to discuss these possible topics. Below is a synopsis of our discussion on each topic.
1) Literacy Plan: I was interested in this topic because I believed it would apply to every student and our student achievement would increase in more than one content area. However, after discussing the topic with my site supervisor, she felt that the research was already being done by a literacy team of which I am a member. It would not be a project that I could “run with” because we are a part of a grant that leads and directs the literacy plan and overall goals. She thought that there might be a better topic that I am more passionate about that I could direct myself.
2) Teacher-Lead Families: I started off with an inquiry into intrinsic motivation and after having several discussions with my site supervisor I wanted to find out the relationship between student apathy and parent apathy. Then I was pondering my inquiry and stumbled upon the idea of school families. Maybe if we could provide a “home away from home” we could actually combat parent apathy and try to decrease student apathy by providing a supportive family at school. My site supervisor thought this would be an excellent topic to research and that the school families could be implemented relatively easily with our very supportive staff. We could start with minimal activities and requirements and then add to our support system as we determine specific needs of our students. She and I both agreed that this inquiry has the ability to make a difference in many areas of student’s lives and our schools overall student achievement.
3) Self-Assessment for Development: I was interested in having teachers and administrators take self assessments to determine areas of interest for this summer’s professional development requirements. I learned so much about my personal leadership skill and personal relationships from our required self-assessments that I thought it would be beneficial to our staff. I thought that we could all find something to improve ourselves and our teaching skills with these assessments. Then we could choose our workshops and seminars for the summer based on the results. While my site supervisor thought this was a good idea, she did not think it was as beneficial to the school as a whole as my school family idea. Our school already has several professional development activities planned for our staff so there is less leeway for choice this summer. We are addressing some of our campus goals with the mandated activities so they are beneficial to everyone. This might be a possible topic to address in a few more years.
My site supervisor and I decided on: How can implementing teacher-lead family groups (a group of 12-15 multi-grade-level students assigned to a specific teacher) help students with their sense of belonging, motivation, organization, behavior, involvement, career investigating, study skills, social skills and overall success while at CJH? We both felt that this inquiry could benefit each student on some level and potentially change the lives of some of our students. Each child has at least one need of some sort. With these cohesive and collaborative families, we will be able to address many issues of our students. We will hopefully begin to see an increase in intrinsic motivation and a decrease in apathy. With this change, student achievement in our school could see unprecedented growth.
Dana, N.F. (2009). Leading with passion and knowledge: The principal as action researcher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
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