Scott Rocha

EDCI 505 Pella/Calvo

EPortfolio Process Prompts

Reflections on Self

The Action Research Project that I undertook this last year had a pretty significant impact

on me personally and on the way I view myself as a teacher. The fact that it coincided with the

Covid pandemic lockdown ensured an obviously memorable impact. The project and my

enrollment in the Masters program as a whole were almost abandoned by me due to the huge toll

all of it took on my mental and emotional state. Having to transfer and conduct an entire

curriculum to an online medium meant spending an inordinate amount of time in front of a

computer screen. Adding that to an online Masters program was extremely taxing, and it really

made me appreciate and sympathize with what my students must go through. As the year

progressed I realized more and more that I should be offering a more caring class ethic; one that

supports mental health and tries to mitigate the pressures my students face.

I have always tried to make my classes engaging and challenging. I’ve seen many

students coming in to class deficient in literacy and lacking a substantial work ethic, so I’ve tried

to remedy those things by asking more of them than their previous teachers have. I understand

that at a Title I school, so much inequity is stacked against my students, I have been determined

to give them whatever boost I could in the short time they are with me so that they have a better

chance of success once they join the larger, more competitive worlds of college, the workforce,

and adulthood. So while I still hope to maintain that philosophy, my experience through the

Action Research Project has led me to temper that approach. Through the deliberateness of

looking at the background needs and performance data for each student, and how the two
interplay off each other, in addition to the lessons of the project itself, I’ve more clearly

understood the difficulties my students face in dealing with the lessons presented. So I hope to

couch my lessons more in a spirit of facility and understanding. While I still firmly believe in the

urgency of improving the literacy of my students, that urgency needs to be less explicit and

interspersed with bouts of fun and understanding.

Reflections on Learning

My Action Research Project of a Digitally Interactive Text (DIT) revealed the wide

variety of student proficiencies, attitudes, needs, and preferences for English language

development in my classroom. Even within the subgroups (EL, SpEd, etc.) there was no real

uniformity of a particular method or practice that best served them. Additionally, the students

who most struggled with reading or were disengaged with the classwork didn’t respond to the

DIT project as well as I hoped. So the solutions to the questions I had about how to reach and

support at-risk students’ learning remain unresolved for the most part. Students learn in a wide

variety of ways and according to a wide variety of factors, many of which lie beyond a teacher’s

control. My project supports such a simple but difficult-to-accept conclusion. I chose to attempt

to improve students’ reading and academic attitudes, and my innovation appeared to have a small

measure of success on both of those fronts for some students. But for many it did not. So the

implications of this on student learning, from my perspective, are that these lifelong and

complicated areas can only be supported by myself, not “fixed” or remedied.

The DIT project reinforced much of what I had already gathered about student learning.

The fact that the quiz scores on them increased overall from first to last shows that repetition in

building familiarity and routine is an effective practice. The use of data and self-reflection is also

integral for students, as it made them exercise a level of metacognition that often gets neglected.
The Post Reading Questionnaires rendered some useful feedback for me but they seemed to offer

even more for the students, as many appeared to get them to focus on the processes they were

using to negotiate the readings and their understandings of them. The connection between

attitude and learning was also borne out. The former informed the latter, and successful learning

without a successfully fostering attitude did not appear to occur.

The use of technology as both a tool and a motivation for student learning was likewise

positive, but similarly varied in success and limited. The attraction of a medium that is at once

new and familiar to them can bring some students to approach their learning tasks with

enthusiasm. They can be eager to use the immediacy and enrichment that clicks and links and

video representation embody. But it can also complicate the undertaking to an extent that it turns

off students. Too much input or too many options can confuse the issue for many, especially

those for whom reading itself is already asking a lot.

Reflections on Teaching

The improved use of digital technology that this project and the Covid pandemic forced

upon me has had an understandably beneficial effect on me. Looking so closely at the individual

assessment tools and their scores has made me a bit more cognizant of how I design them and

how I can use them to give feedback to students. Because so much information is now presented

in digital form, it is imperative to both me and my students that we continue to practice its use. I

have learned new programs and applications and integrated them into my students’ academic

practices. This will only continue to evolve for me, as it has been a reluctant first step, but a

beneficial and necessary one. I would like to offer more of it, but I would also like to offer the

printed word and hand-taken annotations, as I believe there needs to be a real need for balance

these days. Student feedback on this only backs up what I feel: we need time away from screens.
My students need to be technologically adept, but they can also use to unplug and let their minds

interact with the physical, social, and emotional world that language and ideas can navigate in a

healthy way. The project underscores the need for this, and it dovetails well with my newly

reinforced belief that offering options is truly the best approach to empowering students.

There are obviously too many student linguistic and scholastic issues that I cannot

remedy in a single ELA school year. The DIT models I used I will continue to offer and expand

on for the remainder of my teaching career because they are and were proven through my project

to be simply good teaching practices. The use of data and reflection that I employed will also

continue and will be a larger part of my students’ experiences also. This transparency and

sharing of methodology with students makes the classroom a more democratic and student-

centered place where greater buy-in and self-monitoring can hopefully translate into greater

student success. Between Rounds 1 and 2, when I made the implementation of the project

innovation more explicit, students seemed to respond more authentically, likely due to increased

metacognitive awareness. I think this will be the biggest takeaway for me and what I will do for

my students going forward. If I can make the learning tasks clear from start to finish, repeat the

processes to allow students to become comfortable with them and see their development within

them, perhaps the change in attitude toward something like reading can result. The use of data in

this project spurs me to have students examine their own data as well. Seeing scores is one thing,

but having them plot and reflect on their own scores in a holistic at-a-glance format would be

really useful.