Project Three

Part One: Proposal

What I see…
Students in my English 11B class are either not turning in assignments at all or are
submitting incredible amounts of late work. On average, I receive about 70% of assignments
by their due date, per each class hour. This number is actually up from last semester, when I
was seeing only about 50% of students turning in work on time. However, it is still a large
percentage of my class that is disengaging from the content in some way.

In general, I think that there is a huge motivation issue right now. This is due to many things
(the global pandemic forcing us into online school being the largest one), but I want to focus
primarily on the issue of burnout. My students seem overworked, emotionally tired, and
generally unwilling to even meet the bare minimum some days. When we work at home,
everything becomes homework. I want to try my best to eliminate homework by ensuring that
students have enough in-class time to finish all of their work every single day.

The basics of my strategy…

In my attempts to reduce student stress, increase student motivation, and increase the
numbers of assignments that I am receiving on time, I have decided to reformat my class
structure to be more student centered. To accomplish these goals, I will be implementing
several changes to our synchronous Google Meet time:
1. Modifying all assignments so that they can be completed in-class rather than as at-
home or asynchronous work. This means that most of our work will be collaborative
(student-to-student AND student-to-teacher) rather than individual.
2. All assignments will be due at the end of class time rather than before the next time I
see them. This way, I can check for their understanding of concepts in-between
Google Meets and we can spend the beginning of each day clarifying information
from the last class.
Justification of my strategy…

Because late/missing work has been one of the biggest concerns that I have had with my
students this year, I am hoping that a complete re-structuring of our Google Meet time will
give them the fresh start that I believe they need. If all of our assignments are designed to be
completed in class (which could mean many things, such as completing an assignment in
junction with a Pear Deck that we are doing, having group work time at the end of the hour,
walking through assignments together as a whole class, etc.), students should not have to
spend copious time at home working on English homework and getting further burnt out from
school. This strategy is not only ensuring that I have at least some data for every single
student in my class because if they are in the meet, I should have some sort of work to
examine before I see them again. But it is also helping to give my students are clearer
separation between their school-selves and home-selves in a situation where the lines are
essentially nonexistent now.

Further, my making sure that students are turning in work at the end of the hour instead of
whenever they feel like it over the course of several days, I am better able to gauge who is
understanding material and who isn’t much sooner.

Part Two: Data/Evidence Collection

What I am hoping to claim…
My goal for this strategy is to increase the percentage of students turning work in on time
from it’s current status, which is averaging about 70% of kids, to closer to 80% or 85%.
Further, I hope that by increasing the percentage of students who are turning in their
assignments on time, I am more effectively able to gauge the engagement level of my
classes and better adjust my teaching to suit the needs of my students.

What sources of data that I plan to use…

I will be using student work (calculating what percentage of each class turns in assignments
by the end of each class period) and my own classroom notes and observations (how fully
are the assignments completed, does it appear that students are grasping material, etc) of
the overall effectiveness and engagement levels of my class in order to conclude if my
strategy is working or not.
What lenses of analysis I will apply…
I hope to analyze my data from as an objective and analytical lens as I possibly can. In
general, most of my teaching decisions are already greatly informed by the mental and
emotional needs of my students. So much so, that I can often forget to center student
mastery of content or core concepts as a principle for effective teaching and learning. So
while I will obviously always center the emotional needs of my students at the core of my
pedagogy, I want to take this project as an opportunity to analyze my teaching purely
through a lens of “are my students learning the material effectively?”
So, because I do my best to avoid giving assignment that I don’t believe serve a genuine
purpose, students not completing assignments says to me that they are not engaging in their
learning in a meaningful way. In order to fully grasp the material of our class, I need them to
be engaging with it on all levels. This means that (hopefully) the more students are turning in
quality work, the deeper they are understanding what we are studying.

What I think the data currently says…

In our current model, I think that my current data tells me that my students are feeling
overworked, unmotivated, and are only developing a shallow understanding of course
concepts. Their general lack of engagement in classwork does not match up with the
positive feedback they give me in check-in forms and during one-on-one conversations. I
hope to better balance this

Part Three: Action Plan

The steps for implementing my strategy…
1. Our current unit is ending this week, and we will be starting a new one this Monday.
As I create the unit plan, I need to block out my days differently than I have in the
past in order to better accommodate my “eliminate homework plan. Example here.
2. Instead of doing some sort of lecture style learning in the beginning of class (which is
kind of the current model that I hate anyways), I will be replacing any transmission
style of teaching with student driven activities. So, using Pear Decks as a mode of
engagement, having discussions, playing games, etc.
3. Once we complete the “learn the content” portion of class, we will complete some
sort of assignment or activity together to show our understanding of the content. This
could mean a lot of things. Some examples might be, group work time to complete a
quiz or project, a guided discussion where we walk through questions and students
write answers on a sheet, filling out charts, webs, or maps for our reading together s
a class, reflective journal writing on what we learned that day, etc.
4. Weekly Check-Ins on Fridays to see how students are feeling about the new format.
The steps for preparing my students for the change…
1. During students’ End of Unit Check-In (a google form), ask how they would feel about
a format change and the addition of in-class breaks. Provide link from above so that
they can see what the new format would look like. Use this form to gauge student
interest in a new structure.
2. One first day of the new unit, go over new Weekly Plan format with kids. Thoroughly
explain what we are doing and WHY we are doing it. Make sure to emphasize that
doing work in class means that they won’t have homework.
3. Establish new norms that assignments will now be due at the end of the hour and
that extensions on those assignments should be communicated with an email to me.

We will be returning to (some) (optional) in-person learning on March 15th. So, I hope to
collect all of my data during the first two weeks of this unit (March 1st-14th), before we make
our transition, as I anticipate that really messing things up.

Date…

Part Four: Conclusion and Reflection

What I was hoping to claim…

My goal for this strategy is to increase the percentage of students turning work in on time
from it’s current status, which is averaging about 70% of kids, to closer to 80% or 85%.
Further, I hope that by increasing the percentage of students who are turning in their
assignments on time, I am more effectively able to gauge the engagement level of my
classes and better adjust my teaching to suit the needs of my students.

Ultimately, I found very marginal positive growth in my students, although it was growth
nonetheless. My timeline for collecting data was actually stretched a little bit because my
mentor teacher took over our SAT prep unit, so I really began implementing my strategies
when we started reading Of Mice and Men. Overall, I measured percentages of students
turning in assignments through two means: reading quizzes and character tracking charts.

For the reading quizzes, I found the most growth. During the week where we read the book
in-class together, an average of 86% of students across the three English 11 hours
completed reading quizzes compared to the about 72% of students who completed them
during weeks where they needed to read asynchronously.

For the character chart, I had about 73% of students turn them in on-time, which was growth
from the 68% I was averaging for assignments pre-strategy implementation. Rather than
having to complete the charts completely on their own, we did most of this assignment
together at the start of class as a warm-up activity.
 What I found…
Data Charts
Figure 1
Figure 2

Figure 1: In this chart, you can see what the average percentage of on-time assignments (based on four assignments
from a previous unit) is in comparison to the percentage of students who turned in their Of Mice and Men Character
Charts on-time. As you can see, in each class period, there was marginal growth in how many students turned in their
assignments
Figure 2: In this chart, you can see the affect of in-class reading on on time.
what percentage of students completed their reading
quizzes. We read the book Of Mice and Men in-class together in week two, but students had to complete their reading
outside of class in weeks one and three. Based on the data, you can see that I had the highest percentage of students
complete reading quizzes during week two, which is when we read together.

The limitations of my data are…

There are certainly several limitations of my data. Firstly, I taught the Of Mice and Men unit
during a time when I had both online and in-person students. It should be noted that for both
the character charts and reading quizzes, I had a nearly 100% completion rate for students
who were in-person. The stark difference between my in-person and online numbers really
makes it difficult to say whether my strategy of shifting classes to a more student centered
model or the transition from online to in-person had Quizzes
Reading a larger impact on my student growth.
100%
Because of the way things worked out, these two transitions were happening nearly
90%
simultaneously. So, it is frankly incredibly difficult to basically impossible to actually
80%
determine
70% where my numbers are coming from, which is a severe limitation. However, I have
been
60%able to use weekly check-in forms to at least gauge how students are feeling about the
50% change in class structure, and I have been getting generally positive feedback.
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2nd Hour 3rd Hour 4th Hour

Week One Week Two Week Three

 Based purely on the data that I collected and the student feedback that I have received, I
would say that my strategy was mildly affective. Based on all of the surrounding
circumstances, it is a little bit harder to say for certain (see limitations above). However, if I
were to just look at the entire picture, I would say that the experiment was a success,
particularly when talking about reading a novel as a class. I saw a lot of growth in student
engagement and understanding when we took time to read our book together as a class
rather than asking students to read on their own. If I am using an analytical lens to determine
if I believe students were engaging more effectively in their learning, I would say that,
although the difference in data points weren’t outrageous, the differences I saw in the
classroom were significant.

How I am feeling at the conclusion of my data collection…

Reflecting on my future practice…

In conclusion, this practice has really affirmed for me that my classroom time should be
much more structured around student engagement than anything else. As I mentioned
above, one of my biggest takeaways was in how I will teach novels in the future. If I want
students to actually read a book and participate in meaningful work around it, we need to
read in class together.

Further, taking the time to let students do work in class instead of asking them to do so much
outside of school hours has become really important to me over the past few weeks. This
has felt incredibly difficult to do with the circumstances of this school year, but I genuinely
feel that my students appreciated it when I actually just tried to implement it. In their weekly
check-ins, I noticed a higher number of students telling me that they had positive feelings
about English class and more motivation to get work done, which felt wonderful to hear as a
teacher.