These slides were used at the VSTE 2019 conference to discuss our district’s application of action research.
After being named an Apple Distinguished School, Goochland Middle School was proffered an opportunity to come to California and to learn how to apply action research as a self-improvement framework. I took our technology coach and principal out to San Francisco and we undertook a yearlong research project. Could we show how sustained collaborative work with a coach and teacher could improve instructional outcomes for students?
Our district’s strategic plan had us focusing upon deeper learning, which became the bedrock of our 1:1 program. I built our model of deeper learning across multiple models.
In our presentation, we wanted folks to understand that we were attempting to measure a very complex thing: deeper learning.
It all started at our middle school, but we bought the protocol of action research to each one of our schools. In each case, the coach would partner with a small number of teachers for extended lesson planning and lesson execution.
We called our program Pathways toward Deeper Learning. Our principal research questions are shown here:
Our study proved to the development of a number of extraordinary learning experiences for students truly enhanced by technology.
And we analyzed the impact of our coaches actual instructional coaching and how it resulted in learning experiences and their depth of learning for students. We did this buy devising an algorithm applied to observations by school administrators.
This was one of our presentations of data: this shows the progression of four coaching projects using our component pillars of deeper learning. The hypothesis was that with more coaching, the level of depth would increase.
Our team repeated this presentation at the 2019 MERC Conference, hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University.