What action was taken?

After Questionnaire 1

 

After the results of questionnaire 1 were collected and analysed and along with my own observations and the statements and questions on the exit card post it notes I chose to adjust my ILA program by making two changes.

 

1. To extend the unit by an extra week so that I could give the students some explicit instruction on how to both use information search engines such as Google and Bing along with also spending some time in the library researching some random topics in the library. These lessons did not follow an inquiry method, instead were completely teacher driven and their purpose was to teach my students the needed experience and skills in research that they did not have before.
2. The second change I made was to add in another formative task that involved my students picking their own form of presentation. This task was added because the students had shown no ability to move forward with their major task as they were not used to having so much freedom in terms of their creativity and so I wanted to let them have a task that was not super important (not graded) to their grades but would allow them to experiment and try different things.

 

After Questionnaire 2

I decided not to make many changes to my ILA after questionnaire 2 because I truly feel that my ILA is moving along at the perfect pace. My students are engaged and enjoying the work and with the addition of extra explicit work on researching and note taking I have started to see a real relevance in the type of information that my students are finding instead of the big blocks of text they were finding before. Instead of changing the ILA I decided to focus on two things that I as a teacher can work on to make sure the ILA continues to move ahead in the correct manner.

1. First is to give less explicit instruction to my students and become more a guiding figure. I still find myself giving my information the information too much instead of challenging them to do the research themselves.
2. The second thing I want to do is continue to work on note taking and research skills, but to do it with more of a focus. This would include taking students in small teacher directed sessions where we work on a specific aspect of note taking or research that I know those 4-8 students are not comfortable with.