Week 2: Action Research

This week I decided to change my Action Research topic. I had originally been planning on studying the effects of peer editing in the classroom, but thought that it'd be difficult to get good results. I had my students do an initial writing exercise in groups. While it worked for some of the groups, there were some groups that didn't respond well to the group writing and some who didn't want to work in a group at all. Rather than force them to write and work in groups, I decided to change it to something more individualized. I'm still going to focus on writing (because I think it's really important to get them writing and change their negative attitudes toward writing), but I'm going to be working with a multi-genre project instead. My students are going to write a memoir in multi-genre form. A multi-genre project is one that I've been wanting to do for a long time, and I finally have the opportunity. I think it'll interest my students to know that not everything that they write has to be in one particular form.

On a side note, I learned that one of my students transferred from a prestigious private school this year. I've been noticing that he acts different than the other students, such as always sitting erect at his desk and only speaking when spoken to. He prefers working alone and noise bothers him. He's a great student, in that he answers questions, does perfectly on assignments, and doesn't chatter. But, I'd love to be able to make him laugh. That may be an odd goal, but I want him to learn and have fun.