Action Research/Campus Supervised Internship Hours UPDATE!

Campus Supervised Internship Hours:

I have completed 108 Campus Supervised Internship hours so far.  I have been fortunate to have so many opportunities this past semester to work with my principal, asst. principal, and instructional specialist in various roles.  I was able to attend Jeff Anderson Writing Training, and use that information to create a power point presentation and provide our whole staff with training on the “Top Ten Things Every Writer Needs to Know”.  This experience taught me that it’s not so hard giving presentations to the staff.  This was something that I needed to know considering I was debating whether or not I wanted to interview for the campus instructional specialist position that would be opening at the end of the semester.  My principal asked me to be the campus moderator for the school website.  I attended the basic level training session for this new role.  I learned how to create different staff/grade level pages and how to create staff bios.  The website is looking better than ever now.  I am looking forward to continue with this role.  I was able to model advanced features of different Microsoft programs that our building utilizes to new teachers.  One of my favorite roles this past year was serving as our campus Professional Learning Community Technology Facilitator.  I facilitated the creating and writing of our campus technology goals with other members of our school.  There was one person per grade level on our team, as well as, a teacher from the special education department.  Through this PLC, we were able to raise awareness of different classroom friendly ways to use technology inside the classroom, and how to use the district provided mypisd.net program effectively on all grade level classrooms.  I also organized a mypisd.net training available to all the teachers in the building.  I also identified the online program Quest Garden as an extremely beneficial source for housing web quests.  I spoke to my principal, and she agreed that memberships could be purchased on each team.  This will be a great encouragement for others in the building to create engaging, student centered web quests to go along with the district curriculum.  This semester I also utilized online student testing system (MAP), to measure student growth from the beginning, middle, and end of the year in the areas of math, reading, language arts, and science.  Through this computer based testing, I was able to identify specific content areas that students needed immediate interventions in.  After analyzing the specific test score threads, I was then able to create fun tier II and tier III interventions for those students needing extra support.  I attended an ARD meeting at the end of the year for one of my student’s yearly reviews.   It was determined through this ARD annual review that my specific student had met all of his speech goals, and was no longer in need of speech services going forward.  Being able to take part in this process was very eye opening for me.  I also had the unique opportunity of taking part in the interview process in two different roles this year (as the interviewer and the interviewee).  I interviewed for our campus instructional specialist position.  I had forgotten how nerve wracking this experience can be.  I learned that I needed to do everything that I can to make the candidate feel comfortable when giving an interview.  I was offered the position, and was then able to take part in interviewing other candidates to replace my third grade position.  I will start in August as our campus instructional specialist.  This will bring about new opportunities to gain campus-supervised hours.  I’m glad that I was able to complete so many hours while still being in the classroom. 

Action Research Project Status:

I have been able to accomplish a great deal of my action research project by the end of this semester.  My action research question/wondering is to examine the effectiveness and motivation related to using traditional paper-based reading fluency and comprehension interventions to technology enhanced reading fluency and comprehension interventions.  The first step that I completed was surveying my tier III students to gain more information on if they were more interested in paper-based interventions or technology enhanced interventions.  I was able to analyze their assessment data from the beginning and middle of the year to identify specific learning targets that they would need extra support in.  I identified current research on using technology-enhanced applications specifically in the areas of reading fluency and comprehension.   I began utilizing the application Timed Reading in my tier II and tier III instructional groups.   At the end of the year, I analyzed and compared those students MAP scores in reading from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.  I also had the student complete end of the year surveys on how motivated they were to take part in an instructional intervention group using technology versus paper-based resources.  Part of my project is to present my findings to another teacher, and have her use technology enhanced applications in her tier II and III reading groups next fall.  I’m looking forward in continuing my action research project.  The goal of my project is to incorporate technology enhanced lessons into the tier II and tier III reading instruction groups, as well as, increase student motivation during these extra learning times.