PART A: TAKING ACTION AS A TEACHER- TELLING YOUR TEACHING STORY

Over the past two weeks, I have began my data collection for my inquiry. Since this is still the beginning portion of my data collection, I am focusing on collecting data of what normally happens in the classroom. I will be able to use this information to show the difference that my strategies that I implement make on the transition time. If you don’t have information to compare your action data too, then you are loosing a key part of your inquiry. I first conducted an interview with my teacher that illustrates how she implemented her transition routine into her classroom. I wanted to know exactly what her process was so that I could keep a similar routine when implementing new strategies so that I get true data on the effectiveness of the strategy. After completing the interview I begin my data collection of the regular times, directions, and engagement level of the transitions within the classroom. I began my collecting process with recording the time of the transitions within each of the centers during Daily 5 time. I wanted to record the time in the beginning so that I could see if any strategy I used would yield different transitions. This will allow me to get an average transition time during this time period. In this transition time chart I also included the amount of students engaged right when the teacher starts talking to refocus the students. The time of day is mentioned in the notes portion of the chart, I plan on making a record of various transitions throughout the day to see any type of consistency within time of day and time it takes to transition. The students responded like how they would normally, which was exactly what I was looking for. The average time for the three transitions during center time was one minute and 68 seconds. The average amount of students engaged after the transition was 12.33 students. This will give me a good beginning running record to see the effectiveness of the transitions. I just have to remember that if I use a transition strategy during any time other than center time, the data may be skewed if I try to compare it because time of day could be a variable that affects the transition time.
Another piece of data that I was able to collect over the past two weeks was a model of the students movement during a transition. I wanted to collect this because with this I will be able to understand the paths and movements that the students make while transitioning which will shine light onto how the tables influence the time. I saw that there is a general path that the majority of the students follow, many of them go in the same direction, there wasn’t much conflict on having students bump into each other. They seemed to follow directions in coming to the back table to turn in their paper then went straight to the carpet. I think that if they weren’t going to the carpet, then there might have been traffic jams almost because after turning in their papers they would have turned right around into the oncoming students. Instead, redirecting them to another section of the room allowed the congestion to be almost non-existent.
The next piece of data that I was able to collect was a reflection journal entry of my experience implementing the transition strategies that my CT uses while she was absent and I became the main teacher. This opportunity gave me rich data because before implementing new strategies, I need to see how the students respond to their daily routine when someone other than their teacher does them. The students response to me being the main teacher without the other teacher in the room actually surprised me. They did exactly the same things that they normally did when my CT did the transitions. There wasn’t really any students that strayed from following directions. This may be because I have been in their classroom for a little while so they are familiar with me and understand that I am just as much their teacher as my CT is. Even though this wasn’t a planned piece of data that I was going to collect, I think that it will benefit my experience with the inquiry process doing these reflection journal entires because unlike antidotal observation notes, a reflection allows me to articulate my entire experience from the day and not just one portion of it.
PART B: REFLECTING ON LEARNING- FORMATIVE DATA COLLECTION ANALYSIS

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During this time of data collection, I learned a lot about the normal routine of how transitions look without any type of different strategy implemented. I learned that even if my CT isn’t the one doing the transition, the students still follow directions in the same manner. This is a key portion of understanding what strategies actually work and which are effective in the classroom. Another thing that I learned that I’m glad I realized in the beginning of my inquiry, is that there can be a lot of uncontrollable variables within what can affect the time of a transition. I think that I need to remember this throughout my inquiry, because if I only implement a strategy once, I may not get accurate information. Implementing the strategies more than once and taking the average will allow me to really understand a true time of the transition. Another variable that I need to remember to make note of during my data collection is the amount of students that are present that day, and any type of occurrence that may have happened during the day that could affect the time. I believe this learning was important for my inquiry because now I’ve gotten rid of the guessing game of how effective something was when I get to the analysis part. If you don’t have something to compare your end results to then how will you know what works and what doesn’t work? I think that my next step of data collection is to video the transitions, this will give me the ability to really analyze and get a visual on the factors of the transition such as the tables, the movement and direction, and the expectations that were set. Another step I would like to take is getting a student interview at some point in my inquiry. I think that the CT interview did provide me with a lot of data that is beneficial for my inquiry, but getting the opinion of the ones that are actually doing the transition might provide me with more ideas of how I can better the transition time even more. Based on the data that I’ve collected, I still wonder how me implementing new strategies will differ from my CT implementing new strategies. Will there be a difference or will it be the same just like when I became the main teacher when there was a sub?