Questions for the conference

1. Do teachers often spread out their data collection among every class that they teach for the whole trimester / semester, or do they often focus only on one or two? And what shall I do?
2. What is the best way to get students to effectively work autonomously on the projects and work that I assign without A. requiring needless turning in of assignments that effectively doubles my workload for minimal results, and B. providing enough freedom so that they feel creatively free yet willing to work hard for their results?
3. How do I fight against technological apathy? Students have the gall to complain about their ipads.

Curricular Design Rave-out

What I love about my curricular design is that I'm determining what it actually is as we go; let me explain, in brief: two of the classes I teach are being invented as we go along the trimester. We have a long view of what we're teaching, but the specifics are being invented and refined as we go. While this is time consuming, it is also freeing creatively, as we can determine our fates as far as what we want students' experiences to be in the class. I've seen it take some pressure off of students with regard to writing and grammar, since we decided to alter the way we implement and use it. Having them apply specific techniques and concepts to their writing is a great way to go, and they are more focused and less stressed about its finer points this way. Since having the freedom to determine what we are going to teach and how we're going to teach is a luxury that teachers often don't get to enjoy, I'm liking it and not taking its opportunity idly.

abstract of AR

The current state of my action research is thus: all of my classes are involved in the writing of essays within the contextual environment I'm working to create and refine; thus, I only have 1 set of essays in with 1 survey accompanying them. However, I'm now hitting the point where the 10th grade multigenre writing projects are coming in for revision, and comp 12 essays are coming in for revision, so that'll move the process along. By November, all of my data will be in across all classes across multiple skill levels. So, I can't say I've made any conclusive discoveries about the effectiveness of my new strategy yet; however, it feels like I'm making some progress.