Do you need to restate your essential question? Is it the same as semester one?
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This study has been very fun to undertake. I am not done collecting data and I won't be until late next week. I have been interested to see if there are other strategies that might also help in the development of active listening skills. One of the things that I have originally contemplated doing my research on from the beginning was mindfulness but I didn't really know quite how to weave it all together. I guess that the new question that I have been led to is: " Does mindfulness improve the active listening skills of my first grade students?" I think that using mindfulness as a strategy to improve active listening skills would be really interesting to take on. Once I have a clearer understanding of the effectiveness of my strategies I can have a clearer understanding of how to go about improving it.
I am also interested in the connection between executive functioning and active listening skills. Executive functions are a set of cognitive processes that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior: selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals. I wonder if there is a way to improve active listening skills by also working on executive functions. I am unaware of how one would do this ,but it seems that if a child is unable to pay attention and focus that active listening skills would be heavily impacted. I am clearly a bit behind in my research in comparison to everyone else. Just over Thanksgiving vacation I realized that I needed a control group to collect data from as well. I sent out parent letters to that group last week and have been getting them back. Not to mention, I also had an epiphany that I also needed to collect more information from parents and students. I also needed to re-submit my IRB to reflect that I would also be collecting a parent and student survey. I have started to receive these parent surveys back and begun synthesizing the data from them. I do have some pre-test data. I only collected this data on my focus group. I intend to gather this data on the whole class next week to get a better feel of what my class as a whole is able to do. I will also be having the control group take the pre-test as well. Although I am a bit behind in my data collection I have been observing these kids for the last few months as they practice their active listening skills. Those results alone are pretty staggering. Just from the small collection of strategies I have put in place my class as a whole has exhibited a large improvement in active listening skills. They are able to follow muti-step instructions with better accuracy. They are able to repeat information that has been said to them. These were my two primary success criterion.
Next Monday we will be administering the pre-test to the remainder of the class. I will use this assessment as an opportunity to progress monitor the kids who already have a pre-test on the books. I will also have the control group take the test. Then, in the days following the pretest there will intensive active listening intervention delivered. The post test will be given the day before Christmas break. I have learned from this study that with very little intervention students are able to make improvements on their active listening. I have also noticed that teaching metacognition in any form where you make students aware of how their brain works and teaching them to be intune with the goings-on that takes place as they learn new material can help them with their learning behaviors. Trying these new strategies has helped them to be more cognisant of the importance of what and how they are learning. I look forward to finishing the data gathering process so that I have some hard data to back up the observations I have made.
I remember being introduced to the learning pit last year when I attended PBL training through Michael McDowell. I found each training he put on so informative and helpful but the learning pit really helped to open doors to changing my teaching forever. I didn't really have a working knowledge of how to use it, implement it or where to even start with it... but after the training I went to school the next day, put a simple diagram of the pit on the front board and asked the kids to consider where they were on their journey toward being proficient writers. It took them a while to understand what I needed and wanted from them. I started using lines with them like, " Mistakes are how we learn" and..." there is no such thing as 'I can't'". The feeling in my classroom instantly felt lighter, less tense. I also noticed a change in my students. They started to show greater confidence in themselves and seemed to enjoy learning more. A weight had been lifted and I knew that teaching my students to have a growth mindset would be a part of my classroom strategies from then on.
There is a lack of explicit teaching of active listening skills inside the typical classroom. We are increasing the difficulty of content knowledge expected and increasing the expectations of young children without giving them the tools to help them be successful. One of the four C's is communication but we neglect to give much attention to one of the primary components of good communication and that is the ability to actively listen to message being told to us. Active listening skills will be my dependent variable in this study. We instruct students on how to go through the motions of listening like eye contact, nodding our head to show understanding, and not speaking over the person. We have taught them how to show respect, but not how to listen to comprehend. Half of each child's school day is spent listening to the teacher and to their peers (Wolvin & Coakley as cited in Anderson & Brent, 1994) and they often do it ineffectively (Jalongo, 1996). This same type of study has been performed on older students, but little data has been collected on students in first grade.
My plan is to do a pre-test and post-test model to see what the effect size is for these strategies I plan implement. This is the independent variable in the study. The strategies are explicit active listening instruction, game playing, and art projects. Ability to repeat a verbal message and ability to follow multi-step instruction will be the results indicators. We will be playing a game called telephone to practice actively listening to a message, retaining it into short term memory, and then accurately passing that message on to the next person in the circle. A digital portfolio called Seesaw will be used to collect hard student data with a very simple four quadrant graphic organizer that they can draw a simple picture on. The students will be following oral directions that I give to them. They will earn a point each time they accurately follow one of the instructions I deliver. Link to my innovative Resources Page:
Who are the seminal people researching in the area of your driving question? What are they known for? What are the big ideas? Tell us about the state-of-the-art knowledge related to your question.
I've come across some people who have researched similar questions to mine. No one really stands out at being a seminal person perse. Most of the research I have come across comes from other people who have written their dissertations on the topic. The articles I have found also pertain to children who are a few years older than the ones in my study. I have not come across any "state of the art" knowledge related to my question yet, but I have found that there are facets to active listening that I didn't know existed. "The skill of listening is the first linguistic skill that humans acquire. In fact, fetuses hear voices outside the womb as early as the fifth month of gestation (Doğan, 2008). Perhaps given its primary placement among linguistic skills, the many definitions of listening differ. In general, however, listening comprises sending a message (i.e., transmission), hearing that message, and making sense of it (Özbay, 2005).Listening does not mean watching the other party passively, but making an effort to receive and interpret messages in order to fully achieve communication (Devito, 1995; Omololu, 1984; Umagan, 2007). " (Canpolot, M) I will need to use a mixture of hard data and teacher observation to collect information on all of these different facets. The big ideas I have come across are that listening is a key element of communication that is often overlooked. It is the first skill we develop as infants. "The skill of listening is the first linguistic skill that humans acquire. In fact, fetuses hear voices outside the womb as early as the fifth month of gestation (Doğan, 2008). Perhaps given its primary placement among linguistic skills, the many definitions of listening differ. In general, however, listening comprises sending a message (i.e., transmission), hearing that message, and making sense of it (Özbay, 2005).Listening does not mean watching the other party passively, but making an effort to receive and interpret messages in order to fully achieve communication (Devito, 1995; Omololu, 1984; Umagan, 2007). " ( Canpolot, M) If we are expecting students to achieve proficiency and cometency in the areas of communication and collaboration then we must give them a solid foundation in listening for meaning and understanding. From the studies I have come across, I have found that there has been a positive correlation between systematic active listening instructions and a students ability to perform tasks such and following multi-step instructions. " A review of solution strategies suggested by knowledgeable others and an analysis of the problem setting resulted in the selection of one intervention: an emphasis on social skills instruction attempted to increase positive social interaction and active listening skills. Results from post-intervention data indicated an increase in student use of active listening skills in dyads and cooperative group settings. Findings revealed that students used metacognition to monitor and check their personal listening skills. Findings also suggest that students gained a heightened awareness of the elements of active listening" ( Alonso, L). Citations: Alonso, Laura. Improving Deficient Listening Skills in the Language Arts Program at the Middle Grades. 23 Apr 96 NOTE 52p.; M.A. Project, Saint Xavier University. PUB TYPE Dissertations/Theses Masters Theses (042) Canpolat, M., Kuzu, S., Yıldırım, B.,& Canpolat, S. (2015). Active listening strategies of academically successful university students. Eurasian Journal of Educational Research, 60,163-180 Doi: 10.14689/ejer.2015.60.10 |
AuthorI am a first grade teacher who is passionate about her students and learning new things! Archives
January 2019
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