Place, Participants, and Practitioner

Place, Participants, and Practitioner

To visit Evolutions High School you end up driving to Mount Pleasant High School. The school you’ve come to visit but can’t seem to find is actually on the second floor. It is a strange situation, being a school located inside a much larger and well-known school. Even as you drive down Mount Pleasant Avenue, the school building begins to rise up along the horizon: powerful and strong with larges letters on the side highlighted by the sun that say, “Mount Pleasant High School”. These letters claim this building… the building is Mount Pleasant High School’s- there’s no question. You start to ask yourself, “well this is Mount Pleasant, where is Evolutions? Am I at the correct address or even school?” From the moment you arrive as a visitor, student, staff member, or administrator, you recognize that the building and “school” is Mount Pleasant’s, Evolutions High School is borrowing the space.

When you finally enter the building and being to search for the school inside the school, it’s hard not to miss that Mount Pleasant High School, as run down as it is, is still a grand school. The walls and floors hold tradition and history. As you look around the main entrance you see beautiful woodwork, window trims, tall ceilings with old chandeliers. You think you to yourself, “this school could be beautiful, if only someone cared”. You continue to explore and find glass cases, filled with trophies from 1970 and pictures of sports teams from 1996. The sensation of understanding comes over you. You being to comprehend than this school is strong, has seen many tough times and will continue to remain standing. As you travel up the stairs and stumble upon Evolutions High School you get a different impression.

Evolutions High School is a young school, new school. It has that new and unsure vibe about it. The hallways, lockers,and classrooms are identical to Mount Pleasants- it looks like Mount Pleasant. The only thing that differentiates this part of the building from the rest of what you’ve seen are the newly printed inspiration quotes hanging on the walls. You continue to travel down the second floor looking for the main office but can’t seem to find it, instead you see, like any other school, classroom after classroom after classroom. Expect here, inside the classroom are young teachers that look like they could be as old as your own children. Since the second floor provided little information about Evolutions High School and still confuses you because it looks like Mount Pleasant, you decide to travel up to the third floor. Here you see a brightly painted yellow door and graffiti on the wall that says, “Evolutions High School”. Walking down this hallway you keep looking for the main office and can’t find it. At one point, you ask one of the young and inexperienced looking teachers where the main office is. They direct you to the little room right behind you. Which at that point you turn around and actually see a small room, that at one point probably belonged to one person instead of two secretaries and a principle,and notice that it’s the main office.  For the first time, you have found Evolutions High School- you are here- you made it.

The participants of the study are 10th graders from Evolutions High School. They were not randomly selected, instead the researchers decided to focus on one class at a time, the class is being treated as a cohort. The class chosen was Period 4, this class is relatively diverse in regards to race, language, age, and academic performance.

Gender   

• 10 out of 19 students (52%) are female, while 9 out of 19 (48%) are male. The ratio between male and female can be considered equal.

Age

• 9 out of 19 (47%)  students are 15 years old. 8 out of 19 students (42%) are 16 years old, and 2 out of 19 students (10%) are 17 years old.

English Language Learners

• 1 out of 19 students (5%) is considered an ESL student. This particular participant is a tier 3 ESL student.

Special Education

• 3 out of 19 students (15%) are students with IEPs and are receiving special education services

Race

• 5 out of 19 students (26%) identify as Black.
• 12 out of 19 students (63%) identify as Hispanic.
• 1 out of 19 students (5%) identify as Asian.
• 1 out of 19 students (5%) identify as white.

Native Language

• 8 out of 19 students (42%) identify Spanish as their native language, while 11 out of 19 students (57%) identify English as their native language.

Academics

• 5 out of 19 students (27%) are considered on-track in the Summit Learning Platform, while 14 out of 19 (73%) are off track. 1 of the 5 students on-track is actually significantly ahead in the work.  

From analyzing the data, the majority of the students identify as Hispanic but the class is almost split between the native languages of English and Spanish. This information is interesting because it could be assumed (not always a good idea), that the students who identify as Hispanic would have a native language of Spanish. However this is not the case and makes one consider that the majority of this class is relatively bilingual. Which causes certain questions to arise: where was the student born, what language did they grow up speaking, what languages do their parents speak at home? Nevertheless, what is more interesting is that out of the students that speak Spanish as their first language, only one of those students is considered an English Language learning. These statistics are incredibly important in regards to classroom culture and how the students interact with one another.

This cohort in particular is incredibly collaborative and competitive with one another. They are constantly translating, explaining, comparing and contrasting ideas with one another. Since the class being researched is a science class, the activities that take place are usually labs or group projects. When the students work through labs and projects together, their behavior is top notch. Typically, this class has incredible behavior and very few behavioral issues. If an issue is to arise, its due to a cell phone or students being so close to one another they can’t stop gossiping and bonding and therefore are no longer focused on their school work. However, when behavior become derailed, it only takes a few redirections and some positive narration to get students back on track. Like mentioned before, they are competitive with one another and if one student is called out for excellent work or behavior, the other students want to be noticed as well and will curve their actions. Since behavior is usually not a problem, this class is farther ahead and more on track than the rest of the classes.

The curriculum for the class has changed significantly from last year to this year. The school has taken on the Summit Learning Platform, which is a self-directed learning approach versus the traditional learning that occurred last year. Students are responsible for learning material and taking tests outside of the classroom, which is 30% of their grade. This area of learning is called Focus Areas. Inside the classroom students are responsible for completing projects that complement the Focus Areas they are working on. Projects are 70% of their grade. If students work at a certain speed and stay on track with their focus areas than this curriculum is great, however, students gets behind in focus areas and therefore are not prepared for the projects.

When looking at this cohort, technically 27% of the students are on-track, meaning they are caught up on their focus areas and ready for the project, while 73% of the class is not. This large difference in understanding has begun to play an interesting role in this cohort. Instead of chastising each other for their progress, they have instead taken the approach of explaining information to one another and working with each other to improve. All in all, even though this class is diverse in its age, identity, language, and academic progress, the classroom is not diverse in the way the students support one another. It is believed that the varied diversity could be causing such a welcoming classroom culture.

To protect the identity of my students there are a couple of options but two in particular stand out to me. The first is, using an alias for each student and make up a name, the names for each student could be randomly assigned using a name generator. This way the chosen names are not biasly representing the students in any way. Secondly, another option would be to provide each student a random number instead of a name, the number could also be randomly assigned using a number generator as well. In the research paper the students could be referred to as student 1, student 4, student 12 and so on.  

When doing any form of research, it is important to control variables so that you can truly determine the effect your independent variable has on your dependent variable. When working with participants in particular, an efficient way to cancel out confounding variables is to randomly assign participants to an experimental group and a control group using a random assignment generator. This way human variability and biases are statistically canceled out. Even though random assignment helps when regulating human variability and biases, I as an experimenter, need to make sure my observations and data points are not dictated by my own relationships with my students. Random assignment can help regulate my biases, however, an additional option along with random assignment is pick the correct data to collect. The data chosen needs to be clearly defined and in a form that is not affected by relationships and biases.

When engaging with descriptive observation I find myself gaining an insight to my classroom that I haven’t had before. This insight will hopefully allow me to dig deep potentially get to the root of a problem in my classroom. Furthermore, with descriptive observation I will begin to create ideas for how to solve a particular problem in my classroom. Once I determine the problem and a potential solution, descriptive observation will also hopefully help me create an experiment design and implementation for my classroom. Once the experiment is designed and implemented I will begin to switch from descriptive observation to focused observation. The focused observation will be centered around the research question and chosen data. Both types of observation are incredibly important and necessary when choosing to conduct research.