I was trying to think of an organized way to do review the sections of the Final Implementation Plan, and I figure it might be easiest to go paragraph by paragraph, then the person whose Practicum is being discussed for the week can respond through the commentary, noting which paragraph and its corresponding commentary to which she is responding. How does that sound?
That being said, here goes my commentary on the "Summary" section:
Paragraph 1
This lesson was implemented over a period of three consecutive days. The lesson was delivered to eighteen third graders working in homogeneous groups based upon reading strengths and needs. The focus of instruction prior to implementation has been formulating a strong response to text, including the use of feelings and/or details from the text in the response. The classroom teacher assigned students to specific groups.
- Organizationally, I really like how you began with length of implementation, group studied, then focus. As a result, you've created a thesis of sorts for your Final Implementation Report that clearly states what it is that your Implementation was hoping to achieve. You also defined what "strong response to the text" means, allowing this definition to be used throughout the whole of your study and assessment of your Implementation.
- Because it seems like there is a collaborative nature to the "strong response to text", and because the next sentence states that students were assigned to groups, it might have helped to include the idea of collaboration into the last sentence, where these strong responses would move from strong collaborative group responses to text, perhaps to strong individual responses to text.
Student collaboration improved during the lesson implementation. A majority of the students made progress, with fourteen out of eighteen students, or seventy-eight percent, progressing one level on the collaboration scale (Appendix B) and two out of eighteen students, or eleven percent, improving two levels. Two of the students in class did not make collaborative progress during the lesson and remained at the developing level.
- Overall, this paragraph powerfully summarizes your results, which allows you to conclusively state that "Student collaboration improved during the lesson implementation." I also think that giving the number of students as well as the percentage within the class makes your data immediately easily understandable to a reviewer.
- I think as the Appendices are noted, I will also review them. Your rubric is ultimately clear! I was worried it would be difficult to understand what you meant by "remaining at the developing level," but your rubric's categories makes this succinct. Before noting this, it might have been helpful to note what number and percentage of students started in which category, in order to later note where students ended up on this rubric after the implementation. This might have given the reviewer a more developed understanding of the progress made through the implementation of technology with this group.
- Because two students did not make collaborative progress, should your topic sentence state "The majority of students improved their collaborative abilities during the lesson implementation"?
All students made progress in the strength of their written responses. During the lesson using the wiki, thirty-three percent of the students were able to write a response on the developing level on the student response scale (Appendix A). Sixty-six percent of the students were able to write a response on the secure level. Fifty-percent of the students improved one level on this scale, sixteen percent improved two levels and thirty-four percent remained at the same level of response, the secure level. No students had a decline in written performance from the written response to the electronic response.
- I'm slightly confused - are the student written responses collaborative or individual? Did they begin as individualized and then, upon posting comments on the wiki, did the posts incorporate ideas of others and thus become collaborative?
- Your data here is very clear and easily understood when looking at your Appendix. It's really great to see that there was no drop-off rate of student success with written responses when moving from written to e-responses.
The time required to formulate a written response to text was in the fifteen to twenty minute range, depending upon the question presented to each group. The time required to compose an electronic response to the wiki took the full sixty-minute period in the computer lab. It also took students the second sixty-minute period in the computer lab to read, respond to a peer and form a group response.
- I wonder if it would make more organizational sense for this paragraph to fall before the results paragraph (the previous paragraph). I think it might be stronger to conclude the "Summary" section with the final results of Implementation, noting the lack of student decline in written responses, no matter their format.
- The Implementation kind of comes together in this paragraph and makes a lot more sense to me now. I think it may help with clarity of the Implementation Summary to state that the lesson is comprised of students e-responding to text, reading peer responses, responding to peer responses individually and then responding to peer responses collaboratively somewhere earlier; would it make sense in Paragraph 1 or 2?
- Great job avoiding opinion or analyzing the data here - I found this difficult to do, and I would think that avoiding this kind of commentary within this paragraph would be extremely hard, seeing the discrepancy in the time, but you managed to avoid this, which is no small feat!
As a whole, this really summarizes the Final Implementation very well, from the purpose of the lesson, its amount of time and its student group to its data and its results. If I were to focus on one area that may benefit from improvement, it would be the organization of information in order to make the Implementation's plan entirely clear from the very beginning of the Summary to an outside reader. Your discussion of data and results is a definitive strength, as are your clear rubrics found in Appendix A and Appendix B.
I like the way you have suggested setting it up to discuss and refer to specific paragraphs. In the first paragraph, I was attempting to describe the practicum as clearly as possible so that it might be replicated again in another classroom. I appreciated your suggestions in regards to the second paragraph with the topic sentence and clarification about progress and the rubrics.
ReplyDeleteIn your commentary responding to the third paragraph, I should clarify the definition of student responses. The students worked first to write an individual response. On the next day, students worked together using their individual responses to cooperate to write a shared group response.
One of the struggles I had when implementing this practicum was trying to closely and carefully monitor each objective. I think I had chosen too many objectives to measure for this lesson. If implementing this again, which objective/s do you believe would be more critical than others? I am going to create a new post in a minute containing all of my original objectives. Let me know what you think.