Mentors will be assigned to districts that requested them by Oct. 3.
Mentors will be asked to review two online presentations prior to the call. These presentations will be available on the EETT site by October 6. The first presentation will be a narrated version of the overview presentation given to coordinators in August. The second will help prepare the mentors to support teachers as they craft their inquiry question. Mentors should have also read/skimmed the first two chapters of The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Classroom Research if your district has purchased these books.
The first part of the “training” meeting will focus on questions and comments related to the presentations. During the second part of the meeting, mentors will be introduced to the online AR tool. Mentors will leave the first training session ready to start mentoring the teachers assigned to them.
Mentors may select from the following dates for the first “training” session. We will send this information to all mentors but it would help if coordinators also relayed this information:
NOTE: District coordinators and other interested individuals are welcomed to attend these sessions.
EETT 08-09 Teacher Lesson Plan and Student Digital Artifact Research Components
Teacher action research (AR), also known as teacher inquiry, is a strategy for helping educators study their own professional practice (Dana & Silva, 2003). In general, action research engages teachers in the study design, data collection, and interpretation of data around a question related to their classroom practice. AR was chosen as the mechanism to study student achievement because of the time frame of the EETT research, the inherent problems using standardized test data to document the effect of technology use (Haertel & Means, 2003) and the importance of documenting classroom- based student achievement (Dawson & Ferdig, 2006).
EETT teachers will develop AR questions related to the impact of EETT technology and resources on student learning in their classrooms. Master Digital Educators trained as AR mentors and will support EETT teachers during this process. Data and other information related to each AR project will be collected using an online tool known as ARTI (Action Research for Technology Integration). Information collected via ARTI corresponded with research-based codebooks developed from previous technology and learning meta-analyses (Cavanaugh, 2004; Waxman, Linn, and Michko, 2003) and research-based categories related to effective teaching (Ross, Smith & Alberg, 1999). Data from each district will aggregated into district profiles. Likewise, a statewide profile of how EETT technology impacted student learning will be compiled.
For more information on Action Research, including examples of past projects, download the Recruitment Document.