Research for teachers; Week 5 reflection

Action research has become the beginning of an interesting journey in the education. We as educators we need to keep improving, we cannot stop improving and learning the new techniques, technologies that would make our students successful in the future.  EDLD_5301 / Action Research has given the key to find opportunity areas in our classroom, school, district that way when we see something that needs improving, something that is bugging a group of people. We could make things easier, efficiently, simple, smoothly, etc that would benefit a lot of people.

I choose during my course to work with what I know best: a) bilingual b) technology and with this approach try to have a project that would help increase the use of technology in classrooms benefiting the bilingual students. The bilingual population has been increasing in as mentioned by Mark Hugo Lopez , in his report titled U.S. Hispanic country of origin counts for nation, he mentions that as per the 2010 Decennial Census there is 50.5 million Hispanics in the U.S. so what a better way to use my two strengths trying to benefit this growing population be more successful in their reading tests and try also to help the school and district in increase the grades in the TAKS test that were affected this year.

When I included this topic in the discussion, it was great to know that there are other colleagues that are looking for the same area and have some similar projects, the enrichment from the discussion I believe will reflect in a more solid and better project.

The report, "U.S. Hispanic Country-of-Origin Counts for Nation, Top 30 Metropolitan Areas," authored by Mark Hugo Lopez, Associate Director, Pew Hispanic Center and Daniel Dockterman, Research Assistant, Pew Hispanic Center, is available at the Pew Hispanic Center's website, www.pewhispanic.org.

Research for teachers; Week 4 reflection

Well I can’t believe we are just starting our final week on the program. Time it really flies. This week has been a challenge, due to some changes at my school my site supervisor has changed. Unfortunately I have not heard any one taking her place yet, because of that I have not been able to complete this week’s assignment as I would have liked to do it, by meeting with my site supervisor. Instead what I’ve been doing is preparing everything I could think of, to present it to my future site supervisor whenever he or she arrives.

In other aspect of this week, I think I’ve mentioned before, but the idea of this action research it still look similar to other quality improvement strategies used in the manufacturing business, but adapted for school environment. The strategy that made me think of that similarity it’s the force field analysis.

I’m looking forward to see if that is really a similarity or it was just an sole idea.

Research for teachers; Week 3 reflection

Topic: Accelerated Reading

After discussing this week with my site mentor we find a question: How can technology benefit readiness in classroom?
We will take the scores from the last two years and take a hole 2nd grade class, provide them with technological software, that will focus in reading and reading comprehension. The technological resources also include syllables, word recognition, fluency and reading comprehension.

Our school is also a title 1 classroom with 100% low income students and 52% of them are Hispanic. This year there was a grant for reading and the goals were not achieved properly, this was also reflected in TAKS scores who were affected also by this situation.

Below you could find my action research template any suggestions on ways to improve it will be appreciated:


Research Project for Lamar Masters

Thank you.

Research for teachers; Week 2 reflection

This week I really enjoyed the videos, especially the ones from Johnny Briseno and Dr. Kirk Lewis. Personally I always think there is room for improvement in every school, either dismissing students could be a problem, either there are a lot of time loss during instruction or there is a lot of full lines in the cafeteria causing misbehavior during the waiting period.

Being said this, our research and or improvement needs to be consistent with our needs and goals. If I'm planning to improve something some questions that need to arise are: how many people are affected? What tools do we have to improve it? Is it worth the time, money, resources, etc. spending? Maybe the issue or problem is not that big, or turns out that there is a bigger issue somewhere else, affecting more people (students, administrators, parents, etc.) That doing a project on it would benefit more.

Also doing brainstorms with some of the affected people would be beneficial for a project, we could end getting a simple solution to a big problem and it was just never put into test.