McKenna Williams is a reflective teacher. She has noticed an increasing number of students not completing their independent seatwork in language and spelling. She expects students to take responsibility for working independently while she works with small reading groups. Now she wonders whether she should start allowing students to work together in pairs or trios rather than continuing to require them to work quietly on an individual basis. Her common sense tells her that she should continue to require quiet individual work. Her colleague Cal Sitton disagrees. He allows his students to work in pairs.

Question

McKenna respects her colleague Cal and knows he has more experience teaching than she does. But she doesn't want to mirror his teaching without reason or evidence that his strategies are more effective. How might she research this question in her own classroom and produce evidence to support one approach over another?

Answer 1

Suggested Response: McKenna might conduct her own action research in her classroom. Action research involves systematic observations or tests of methods to improve teaching and learning. Her question might be to find out whether students learn more when they work in pairs or when they work independently. It might be to find out whether more students complete the assignments.
For her observations or tests, McKenna could try pairing students for seatwork. She needs to give students guidelines and procedures to follow. She can compare the results of students' work over a period of time. She might compare the number of completed assignments she had with her old approach to the number of completed assignments with the new approach. She might also compare grades on specific tasks such as spelling tests, writing assignments, or worksheets. She would need to set up her study to answer her questions about effectiveness of the two approaches. Is more learning taking place when students work in pairs?