Learning specialist/Instructional designer: Reflection #1

 Learning Specialist/Instructional Designer

Reflection #1

As I progress through my LEARNING THEORIES AND INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNS graduate course, I have learned many new things about what technology in education means and how it can genuinely benefit students' learning.

We have worked on developing a proposal to solve an issue or problem within our teaching field. I have chosen to solve the issue of the lack of reading that our Junior Core English curriculum has. It really focuses on writing, and without proper support and instruction in reading, students cannot become better writers. We can fix this problem by implementing more tasks simply by using the technology available to us. 

We have reached the midpoint in this proposal process, and it is time to reflect on what I have researched, experienced, and how I am feeling about it all. So, let's break it down:

1. The process has been eye-opening. I am really pinpointing how to improve our students' reading levels, and this has always been something our team has talked about at one point over the last few years. Even though reading is a given in an English classroom, without proper instruction and guidance, students do not really build their skills in reading. They simply read. We need to fix this so that students are reading: identifying key details in a text, analyzing the author's purpose, looking for vocabulary, and comprehending what they are reading. Engaging students in the reading process is always tricky, but it can be possible, especially with the help of technology tools and resources. 

2. As anything in education, this process has had its challenges. My PLT tends to avoid talking about fixing some of these reading issues because the idea is that no matter what we do in the class, there is always reading, so there is nothing really we can fix. That may be true to some extent, but the reality is that students are not reading enough, nor are we assessing their reading skills in the best ways possible. In a way, there tends to be pushback. For example, when mentioning this proposal to my team, the teachers all suggested ways to include more reading, but part of it also came off as "do what you need to do for YOUR students, but we should not make things 'easier' for them, but still aim for improvement to those who need it." We know all of our students need this reading support, though. Overall, the support or suggestions I got was minimal, unfortunately not surprising. This challenge will not set me back. I will present my findings and research to the team to really push forward with this idea of improving our students' reading skills with the help of technology.

3. Despite some pushback and lack of support, I am looking forward to seeing how this proposal can solve the reading issue, even if it means just focusing on my students. I believe that every student can read and even improve their reading with the proper instruction and support. This proposal can have a very beneficial potential to allow students to understand the importance of reading and read with a purpose! I know my students will grow to become better readers, and as a result, better writers too.

4. Reflecting on this progress, I would have to mention a positive point: doing this for our students. As teachers, we go into the field knowing our sole purpose: to educate the future generations of students. Seeing my students grow in their reading levels the couple of times I have done reading-based activities excites me. Seeing them read and engage with the text and with each other gives me the teacher butterflies! Simply reading a lower-level text meant for my ELL students and giving them a way to analyze by annotating and answering comprehension questions has improved their reading skills even by a faction! Specifically, their reading comprehension levels have increased by about 10% when comparing their reading test scores to the pre-test scores. What is even better is that they are becoming better writers since implementing more reading! The history teacher I collaborate with has even mentioned they have seen improvement in the students' writing. Score! Success! However, I have to be a Negative Nancy. Even though those positive aspects fill me with pride and joy, actually having to get students to read is a work in progress. Anytime students see a text, they get anxious or nervous and do not want to read. So hurdling them over that hump is one of the most challenging parts of this experience, but they can and will do it with my support! Another negative aspect would be the time it takes on my end to find the texts and tools and the amount of time it takes for students to learn the tool or resource the first time they use it and then begin and finish the reading activity. Ultimately, finding the best resources to use with our students takes time, but that is all worth it when we see growth, engagement, and evident improvement.

5. Using technology in the classroom is reaped with benefits- from enhancing student learning to give more opportunities to collaborate. Using this vast amount of technology and being the leader in my classroom can give my students the power to become their own independent readers, thinkers, and do-ers. Being this leader with tech access gives me encouragement and motivation to learn with my students and become a better teacher for them. It will all become easier the more I gain knowledge and experience with technology in my classroom. An example is using Newsela with my ELL. I have used it a couple of times with my students and already know which levels I should be using when assigning readings. Clearly, the more teachers experience how this technology helps instruction and learning, the quicker and more efficient it becomes to plan with it. Only I can see what helps my students learn, so it is up to me to use technology to support all of my students in one way or another. That is the beauty of technology today- we can use it to differentiate the learning for every single pupil in our presence.