Student's Thoughts

After our second gathering as MIT Spark innovative teachers, I started to become excited about the prospect of my inquiry. I used the time available at this gathering to discuss my issues and confirm my 'innovation' part of my inquiry. After this discussion I came away confident and had a clear picture of what my inquiry would look like.

Not long after this second meeting, I created a survey so I could gather student voice. Due to my inquiry being based on increasing self-efficacy in students writing, I wanted to know whether positive praise would improve this. Below is the data of this question.

As you can see, 73.3% of students agreed that positive praise would help increase their self efficacy in their writing. This is something that I will implement in my next unit with these students.


Secondly, the innovative part to my inquiry is using voice typing. Part of being an effective teacher is knowing 'the learner'. Based on my observations of my Year 11 class, I can conclude that majority of students can orally construct a sentence, however they struggle to put this on a document in writing. So using 'voice typing' as my innovation was an idea to help my students collect evidence for assessments. I surveyed my class and asked them, would speaking in to a document be more beneficial than writing. The data to this question is below.

Overwhelmingly, students thought that this would help improve work output compared to writing on a document. 53.3% yes, it definitely would help and 40% thought it could help somewhat. My next step in my inquiry is to implement both of these strategies in to my next unit of work.

Innovation

On the 15th of May the MIT Spark innovative teachers met at Spark Headquarters to discuss the progress of their inquiry. Discussion at this gathering was based around how every individual has responded to the data that they collated.

This was a good chance for me to discuss the changes that I have made to my inquiry over the last couple of months. I discussed to the group how I reflected upon my data and this brought about a change to my whole inquiry. The inquiry I initially planned had no relevance to my data and I felt that the innovation part would not helped improve the issues I identified. So I explained that literacy was the biggest problem that I had identified within my class, therefore having to implement innovation to hopefully improve this issue.

The focus of this get together was the 'innovation' everyone was implementing in to their inquiry. I was still not clear on what I wanted to do in terms of my innovation. Due to focus being on improving self-efficacy in students writing, I had initially thought about voice comments. However, the feedback from the group on this application was not pleasing. With secondary school students being my focus, the tendency to click on the voice feedback will wear off after a certain amount of time, making it an ineffective tool.

Then someone suggested that voice typing could be a good option for reluctant writers. At this point and time I thought that this would be a great idea, especially for my students who struggle to get words down on their document. The innovative section of my inquiry had been decided and I felt really excited about how this could potentially help my students. The next step for me is to survey my students on how they thought about this idea.