History+of+Our+Action+Research

 History of our Action Research Niskayuna's first involvement in CELA was a study involving the English teachers only. The study focused on using various strategies in the English classroom to increase student literacy. The Center on English Learning & Achievement (CELA) began conducting research in some English classrooms in our district dedicated to gaining knowledge to improve students’ English and literacy achievement. This work included a set of experimental studies undertaken in partnership with schools to implement previous findings and assess the impact on student achievement. The Center’s research found elements of curriculum, instruction, and assessment that are essential to developing high literacy and how schools can best help students achieve success. Based on these findings, the Center has developed and tested its Partnership for Literacy, a professional and instructional development program designed to increase teacher knowledge and student learning. They applied practically in summer seminars over the course of several days to learn to implement the strategies and understand the educational philosophy behind them. Teachers also attended twice yearly, all-day institutes for the same purpose. We also participated in monthly meetings as a large group to discuss successful activities and how to better engage students in literacy. Since 2002, the Center has focused on working with teachers of all levels and subject areas and on providing useful resources to implement previous findings. At that point social studies teachers in our district were invited to join in the work, looking at how some of the same strategies could work in their classrooms. Several years later, the work shifted away from this to working with a few of the middle school teams. Our team, called 82, chose to take up this work. By the way, this is really a Professional Learning Community, even though we don't call ourselves that! A group of like-minded professionals saw a need and began working together to fill that need. We are fortunate that we have the support of our administration, which is allowing us the freedom to pursue our goals. Our work began with a two day "retreat" in the summer of 2006. When looking back on it now, we seemed to have rather simplistic notions of what it was we were up to and how quickly we could accomplish it. What we have realized through this project is that the process is the important thing. We could not have gotten to the place we are now without having gone through the process. It has been sometimes frustrating, at times we were not sure where we were going, or it seemed like we were not getting anywhere, but we persevered and by working together made some important gains. And most importantly this work has impacted our students in a positive way. The first year was devoted primarily to study, reflection, and discussion among ourselves and the CELA consultant. The problem before us was how to extend the CELA literacy model, which had already been adopted by a number of English and social studies teachers in our district, to an entire middle school team comprised of the four core disciplines. It soon became evident to us that the discussion and writing strategies used in English and social studies classrooms could not simply be overlaid on a math or science class. We wanted methods and vocabulary that would fit all of our curricula and provide our students with a powerful and coherent literacy experience. Out of the conversations came the unifying concept of critical thinking - a set of general cognitive processes that are applicable to all disciplines. We defined critical thinking as being synonymous with the analytical, synthetic, and evaluative levels of Bloom's taxonomy. We believed that promoting higher-order thinking of this nature was a worthy cross-curricular goal and developmentally appropriate for 8th graders whose minds are ready to be stretched. In the second year, we began to implement our ideas. We introduced the notion of critical thinking early in the year by having students engage in a series of group tasks, one from each of our four disciplines, that required higher-order thinking. A subsequent pre-survey, administered in October 2007, captured students' nascent concepts of critical thinking. The instructional activities that we undertook in the ensuing months focused first on group discussions, which were a central component of the original CELA interventions in English and social studies. Each of us video recorded at least one extended discussion in our classrooms, and we worked on developing a rubric for evaluating the quality of the discussions and the level of thinking exhibited by the participating students. We also worked on a rubric for evaluating student writing but did not use the rubric in any systematic way that year. This was slow and sometimes halting work, as we were not having CELA meetings on a regular schedule. A post-survey in June 2008 asked students to reflect on how their understanding of critical thinking had evolved over the year and to make suggestions to the teachers for increasing the impact of our critical thinking initiative. The students' responses were remarkably perceptive and mirrored many of the shortcomings that we had noted in our own reflections on that second year: · We needed to be more overt in talking about critical thinking in our classes. We needed to model critical thinking in our subjects and to explicitly point out examples of critical thinking by students when it occurred. We also needed to be more intentional about illuminating for our students the similarities in thinking across the disciplines. · We needed to intensify our efforts if there was to be a significant impact on student thinking. · Class discussions are a useful vehicle for stimulating higher-order thinking, although not all students participate verbally. We needed to place more emphasis on writing in order to assess the thinking of all students. These reflections provided a framework for planning our action research for the school year, 2008-2009. Our goal was to develop the critical thinking skills of all our students. A key decision, made at the beginning of the year, was to devote one planning period a week to CELA. This commitment, which we kept throughout the year, imparted momentum and helped us keep our critical thinking goal at the forefront of our lesson planning and instruction. A second important decision was to complement class discussions with a greater emphasis on writing. We developed a Team 82 Writing Rubric early in the year and began using it for writing assignments in all of our classes. The rubric and a Levels of Thinking Triangle posted in our classrooms provided visual cues that helped students know how our team's critical thinking focus cuts across the four subjects. Students kept portfolios of their writing which was used to assess growth in their thinking over the course of the year. A weekly CELA meeting typically consisted of jointly reading and evaluating recent writings from one of our classes, using the team rubric. While all students on our team are participating in the critical thinking activities, a representative sample of 12 students was chosen. It is these students whose written work was evaluated at our meetings and whose portfolios were examined at the end of the year to measure the impact of the CELA interventions. These case study students also participated in an oral debriefing about CELA at the end of the year.