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Reflection
Challenges:
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Determining what graphic organizers would be the most beneficial for students
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Changing routine slightly at the beginning to allow enough time to practice using graphic organizers
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Determining areas of need and meeting each individual student's needs
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Getting absent students caught up
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Throughout my action research study, multiple students were absent for long periods of time. It was difficult to find time to model how to use the graphic organizers for students who missed the first part of the week. Although this was difficult at first, I was able to see other students step up as leaders in the classroom and take on the role of being a teacher as they taught students who were absent how to use the graphic organizers.
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Students' intrinsic motivations getting in the way as they would want to give up because filling out the graphic organizers was "too much work."
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Having a different organizer and comprehension strategy almost every week
Successes:
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More collaboration and teamwork amongst students
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Using the graphic organizers from the McGraw Hill Wonders Curriculum that aligned with our weekly stories and skills
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Seeing students choose to use graphic organizers to help them
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Increase of student involvement during both whole group and small group instruction
New Learnings:
As a result of this action research, I learned a great deal regarding graphic organizers and reading comprehension. First and foremost, I gained a greater understanding of reading comprehension and the role the different comprehension strategies play in developing active readers. Secondly, I gained a better insight on the role graphic organizers play in helping students create a visual representation of the information they read, and how that visual aids them in better understanding the story as a whole. Third, I gained an abundance of strategies that I can use alongside graphic organizers to help my students become even better active readers in the future.
For example, before this project, I was very unsure how to show my students the importance of going back into the text to help find their evidence and how to model doing this while filling out a graphic organizer. Now, I find myself using a mental picture of the outlines of different graphic organizers myself while reading. Additionally, I have more confidence in my own abilities to find the various supporting details that are needed to help prove items like the theme of a story, which is an area I struggled with before this study. This is crucial for me to know especially for modeling, as I think aloud for my students and show them the processes I go through when completing a graphic organizer and reading a story.
Impact:
This action research study has impacted my teaching in a variety of ways. Not only have I developed more confidence in my own reading abilities, but I have also learned how to help my students build up their own confidence levels while reading. Because of this study, I learned the importance of not rushing to teach a new strategy. It takes time to fully grasp a new concept and because of this, I have grown to appreciate using the explicit instructional approach for both whole group and small groups using the "I do. We do. You do." instruction style. Through this research study, I have grown in my instructional approaches and helping students develop a better understanding of the new strategies I teach.
Changes I Would Make:
If I repeated the research study, there are a number of items I would alter to help my students get more out of using graphic organizers to enhance their reading comprehension skills. First and foremost, I would not teach my students a new graphic organizer each week. Rather, I would find a graphic organizer template I could utilize for multiple different comprehension strategies in order to allow my students to become more comfortable and familiar with a graphic organizer.
Another change I would make would be to make learning how to use the graphic organizers more tactful and hands on. For example, when teaching students how to use the compare and contrast graphic organizer, rather than using a worksheet and drawing the Venn diagram on the whiteboard; I would use two hula-hoops and cut out the similarities and differences ahead of time for my students to come place in the two hula-hoops. I believe this would have been more beneficial for students as it would have made learning the organizer more hands on and engaging for students.
Moving Forward:
Next year, I plan to start using graphic organizers from the very beginning of the year, as I noticed the Wonders Curriculum does a great job cycling back through the various graphic organizers each unit with similar genres. I also plan on implementing the changes listed in the previous section, including teaching how to use the graphic organizers more hands on using different activities to help keep students engaged in using them. Throughout my study, I constantly referenced my growth mindset bulletin board as students did not always appreciate the amount of work they had to do to complete the graphic organizers. Because of this, we really focused on getting out of the fixed mindset when being presented a new graphic organizer and focused on having growth mindsets. Moving forward, I want to continue to help my future students build a strong growth mindset and to not give up when the work starts to get tough as it is helping them grow as learners!
Lastly, after analyzing my students interactions with the texts throughout the 6 week action research study, I noticed that it would be beneficial to teach my students text tagging alongside graphic organizers. When using a graphic organizer, students are continuously going back into the next to find their evidence and supporting details. Thus, it would help students to learn how to tag the evidence they find using different codes so they can annotate the text correctly rather than highlighting every word they read. I believe these changes going forward would help students become active readers as they are taught how to engage even more with the stories they read.
