Reflection

At the start of this project I thought that collaboration would be a cinch. I thought nothing could be easier since I am collaborating with my friend and mentor who I know and get along with well. I did not anticipate the difficulty of using a wiki to demonstrate our collaborative process. Nor did I expect to be so detached since I was not actually working at the school on a daily basis. Finally, there was some communication break down that I also did not expect.

First, my collaborating teacher and I are quite social. We love to collaborate in person and on the phone. We both were comfortable emailing documents to one another and links to websites, etc. However, demonstrating our work on a wiki site was much more challenging. In addition to collaborating on a unit plan for students, I also had the challenge of coaching my partner through some technological difficulties. While we were able to overcome our obstacle, I was surprised at how much time we spent sorting it out. I think that if the wiki were not required for the class, we would have not included that technology component in our collaboration. However, I can see the advantages of using a wiki for collaboration with different personality types, distance learning collaborations, and for collaboration projects that involve more participants. I also, see the value of the experience in this particular class. If I were to do this project over again, I would dedicate more time at the beginning to learning the ins and outs of how to use the wiki. Then I would dedicate a specific amount of time instructing my collaborating teacher(s) on how to use the wiki.

It would have been beneficial for me to be acting as a librarian in the school where Diane teaches. Since I was not the librarian in that school, our collaboration did not reach the depth that one would want as a full time librarian. I was not there on a daily basis to anticipate Diane's needs. Nor did we have a continuous conversation about how the collaboration was going in the classroom on a daily basis. While we did communicate about the day to day process over the phone, it is different than being able to touch base with one another in person and in the midst of the action. Had I been in the building, I could have observed more of the classroom activities and I could have been of more assistance in the library as the students were researching and writing. Being present for observation would also have increased my ability to access the progress of the students. Being present is really essential for the assessment process of outcome based learning.

Finally, one of my major blunders was not communicating the purpose of certain types of assessment and evaluation techniques. Also, I faltered in communicating the exact process I envisioned for the unit. If you have checked out the wiki you will notice two things that resulted from these mistakes. One is that there are two rubrics available for evaluated the final writing project. One rubric is the one Diane used and that the students were used to. The other rubric is one that was created by both of us, focused on information literacy and writing standards. It was my hope to use the rubric we collaborated on because it was directly related to the outcomes we hoped to achieve by doing the unit. However, I did not communicate the importance of this type of rubric and Diane was not comfortable using it. The second mistake was that I did not communicate that the rubric should be given to the students at the start of the assignment so that they knew exactly what they needed to accomplish. Also, I mentioned giving the students deadlines throughout the assignment as goals for them to achieve, but this did not happen. I think it was because I simply did not communicate these items well. You will notice in the lesson plan for the writing assignment Diane mentioned that the students requested specific instruction on what to write and a rubric for the writing assignment. I was surprised when I read this because I thought I communicated the need for those two things to be distributed to the students.

Overall, I think our collaboration unit was a good starting point. It could be made better with a few modifications. Those modifications include the librarian being more present during the actual unit, using a rubric that is directly related to the teaching standards and making sure the students know where they are going and what they are doing throughout the unit.

Assessment Part Two

Our unit is complete. The students were very excited about turning in their creative writing stories and Diane is pretty confident that the stories will be a good reflection of their learning over the course of the unit. For our final assessments we have used a few different tools.

First, the pre-teach/post-teach checklist has been collected and analyzed by Carrie, the librarian in this collaboration. An increase in content knowledge concerning the holocaust and worldwide oppression was indicated by 100% of the students involved in the unit. 50% of the students indicated improvement over the course of the unit for specific tasks including the following:

Reading for Pleasure-2%
Evaluating/Analyzing Information-7%
Pursuing In-Depth Study of a Topic-2%
Analyzing Non-Fiction Writing-10%
Creating an Outline-5%
Creating a Concept Map-5%
Constructing new Ideas from Historical Information-5%
Identifying False Information on the Web-13%
Writing a Fiction Story Based on Research-13%
Focusing During Discussion-2%
Participating in Discussions Appropriately-7%
Evaluating Photos for Meaning/Purpose-7%

An open book quiz was used to evaluate the students ability to acquire new content knowledge on the book Night. A worksheet was used to see how students could apply the new information they were learning about the world and history to their spiritual journey and everyday life. A rubric was used to evaluate the students creative writing abilities. The rubric evaluates the quality of the short story and the technical aspects of the short story.

Part of the requirements listed includes turning in the note pages the students were required to fill out while they were researching on the internet. These note pages can be evaluated separately to see the types of websites students used to acquire information about their topic.

Assessment Part One

Diane and I are close to wrapping up our unit. As we are finishing we have realized that we may have to modify our initial plans for assessment. Diane and I created a rubric to evaluate the work students have done for their creative writing assignment. I wrote the rubric criteria for the information standards we hope students will reflect at the end of the unit. Diane created the portion that assesses the students writing skills. The students received these guidelines before they started writing their pieces.

As the students have progressed, Diane is hoping to give a little more leniency in the grading process. She has expressed that the rubric seems a little wordy and more difficult to use. She has also reasoned that she may be hesitant to use the rubric because it is simply different from what she is used to. I am willing to change the type of assessment form we use because it is important that both collaborating participants feel like they have ownership over the project. However, we must be certain that we are still evaluating the students on the same skills we expressed to them at the beginning of the assignment. We will continue to work on an assessment form that satisfies all the standards we hope the students have achieved.

In order to communicate progress to other stakeholders, like the principal or the current librarian, we will have the students complete a post-teaching checklist. This checklist will be identical to the pre-teaching checklist the students completed at the beginning of the unit. This will give us data about our students abilities before and after the assignment. We will use this to demonstrate the progress of our students throughout this unit. The evaluation of the final creative writing assignment will be used to confirm the students' perceptions of achievement. We will display the information in a one page document that will give a summary of the unit and will graphically display the before and after data.