Our Inquiry Cycle
Equity-Based Research Theme: As a team we found that our classes are filled with students who struggle with intrinsic motivation, productive struggle, and gaining independence. Through data collection such as empathy interviews of focal students and student observation, our findings tell us that educators need to prioritize student intervention. Our central question is: What happens when educators take a stand on fostering a learning community that cultivates productive struggle, collaboration, intrinsic motivation, and self-efficacy instead of relying on compliance-based teaching and external motivation?
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Content Understanding Goal: Unpacking student independence, particularly when tied to a growth mindset, is best to be understood during lesson observation. Our team focused on one member's fifth grade class. Students were working on forming argumentative essays, in which we collected data on the class as a whole, in addition to, two focal students. The goal of the lesson is for students to draft the hook and two sentences of general topic information within the introductory paragraph of an argumentative essay. We believe explicit literacy instruction and individual application of literacy skills through productive struggle and peer collaboration, is key to accessing higher order thinking. Research tells us that application of critical thinking skills and problem solving will help students as learners and beings in society. That is why we chose our lesson to be literacy based: to see if (and how) growth mindset based language, and practices are being utilized by students.
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Focal students are students who educators want to get a deeper understanding of them as learners, individuals, and identity in the world. Throughout the course, we chose focal students in our individual classrooms to collect data from, for the purpose of testing our equity and research-based interventions/teaching practices. The focal students we chose to examine during our literacy lesson are classified as an emerging multilingual learner (EML) who often flies under the radar, and a student with a 504/Student Support Team (SST) needing a teacher and outside support to access fifth grade level material.
Who are focal students?
Building critical thinkers through self regulation
Current research suggests that educators are taking the steps to incorporate meta-cognitive strategies to develop literacy and mathematical advancement. However, we found that researchers are pushing for the implementation of clear instructional strategies that are, specifically, developmental appropriate to a student's grade level, identity/ role in a biased educational system, and personal motivations to further productive struggle. The use of instructional strategies means nothing if educators do not appropriately teach, model, and encourage students to self regulate their learning as it is happening. Our focal students in particular are learners who struggle with understanding what they need, so they get "stuck". We have the difficult task of observing how students pull themselves out of the learning pit, and what that means for us as educators.
Student Data
Below are student work samples from Focal Student 1, Focal Student 2, and whole class observations
Next Steps:
After guided instruction, most students, including focal students, were able to self monitor learning (i.e. aware of what to complete, and how much they have done). Yet, there is an “epidemic” of writing avoidance as a whole. We've attributed writing writing avoidance to a lack of applying explicit writing skills to a specific content-learning goal, in this case an historical argumentative writing piece.
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What happens if we use other modes of writing? (i.e. jigsaw, whiteboard, sorting)
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How do we engage the students that have trouble starting?
What does this mean for me, us, we?
Me
Our lesson study cycle #1 taught me that educators need to center students who are not being systemically served, or fly under the radar. We often see student's (lack of ) motivation as something to be "fixed", rather than something to be studied and in partnership with the learner. Our focal students (who are systemically undeserved and/or unintentionally ignored) exhibited a growth mindset through their willingness to participate during whole class learning, yet lacked explicit strategies to examine their learning when they are "stuck". In my own practice, I am moving forward utilizing and testing growth mindset and self regulation strategies for all students, not just my focal students.
Us
We
Let me clear: utilizing a growth mindset/ self regulation strategy is not enough on its own. While observing our focal students, it is evident that students are using self soothing strategies to maintain focus, special sensory seeking behavior. Though it helped maintain individual focus, self regulation is not enough to maintain critical thinkers because students who know how to regain focus struggled with intrinsic motivation to complete a task when they are "stuck". Our host teacher has explicit high expectations for students, yet students struggle to achieve learning goals without teacher redirection, or reminder of growth mindset language. We are taking away an explicit teaching of what to do when they are "stuck" during literacy instruction, implying they apply problem solving skills to all individual tasks.
We are educators, not miracle workers. Our job is to educate our students, not "fix" them, or change who they are. Not to teach them grit or to "pull themselves by their bootstraps". There is a fine line between wanting students to productively struggle for the purpose of building endurance towards healthy educational failure. Failing means we learned something, even if it wasn't the specific content learning goal for that day. Perhaps students are simply learning how to fail that day. Failure leads to acceptance of their whole selves in the classroom. Failure allows them to explore their capabilities, including what they naturally possess, what their families and communities say is true, and what we tell them is true. At the end of the day, we want students to come to the same conclusion: failure is an honest and necessary step in learning how to self reflect, self regulate, and practice critical thinking skills.