Week 32-Reflect on your learning journey (Check)

What?

Upon starting with the MindLab course, my main goal coming into this was to upskill myself with the most current technology tools and knowledge as I wanted to feel more confident. I had graduated from a four-year teaching degree many years ago but had only relieved since then. I felt like I was getting behind the times. Participating in this course it has gone beyond my original expectations. It has completely changed my teaching practice. As I am a beginning teacher I came from not having a lot of teaching practice, especially within a classroom as I also teach via distance. I was able to identify that engagement was an area that impacted on the quality and quantity of teaching that would happen. It was important for me to target this area and implement change so that I could make connections to the disconnected students and their whanaus and start making that difference, which was the reasoning behind wanting to be a teacher in the first place.

Now what?

As Osterman & Kottkamp (2015) suggested the first step of the observation and analysis is to identify the 'problematic situation as a meaningful focus for inquiry,' (p.73). I identified the engagement of my distance students as my main issue and decided that this was the direction that I wanted my inquiry to go. Firstly, before making my final decision, I sent anonymous Google Forms to my students and their supervisors to gather feedback on engagement and how engaged they thought their student was. This Google Form feedback solidified my initial thoughts about distance student engagement, with many identifying that lack of motivation and willingness to learn to be a big hurdle for them at home. It was important for me to gather the feedback from the students and their whanaus, as well as their views, were the drive behind my inquiry. It was also important to me as a beginning teacher as I have to reflect on the teaching standards regularly and how I would be providing evidence of them in my teaching practice. The main standard that I felt my inquiry addressed was Professional Relationships and whakawhanaungatanga. The link to my students and their whanau are essential in distance education.

The MindLab course introduced the topic of gamification to us in Week 13. Before starting this course I was actually unaware of the impact that gamification can have on learning. This was an area that I did not know a lot about and was why I wanted to incorporate this into my teaching practice. With the Research Essay that we did, I was able to collect a lot of research around gamification and learning for distance students, however, they were based at a higher level of education. There wasn't a lot of information around primary and intermediate level and the impact it could have. I decided to use the app and website called ClassDojo to target the student's motivation and have them more willing to learn by adding points and rewards for certain behaviours that showed they were engaged, see photo below of the types of points that I allocated for:

So what?

Introducing gamification and ClassDojo to my class list was new for me, my students and also their whanaus. Some had come across it at a previous school, others had not. I completely changed my teaching practice to have this working alongside what I was already doing. I had to make sure that I allocated enough time to monitor and keep up to speed with what my students were engaging with. Some days I found this incredibly hard to keep up with, which at the time didn't feel like a great thing, but in the end, it was as my students were engaging! They were increasing their level of engagement. I learned many things throughout my inquiry. Firstly, that distance students need more motivation than face to face students and I needed to be more equipped on how to address and provide for that, ‘students can easily become distracted and overwhelmed and may lack the motivation to accomplish course tasks,’ (Lehman et al, 2013, p.3). Second, there is more than one type of engagement; behavioural, emotional and cognitive. Thirdly, that using gamification elements did work! It did increase their behavioural engagement. Using ClassDojo did what I intended it to do. Because of these results and also because of the 90% feedback to continue on with ClassDojo I will be keeping this as part of my teaching practice for the foreseeable future, adjusting the areas that I want to target looking ahead at next term. I also want to try and target the two other types of engagement; cognitive and emotional so that I am addressing all areas.

References:
Lehman, R. M., Conceição, S. C. O., & Conceio, S. C. O. (2013). Motivating and retaining online students: research-based strategies that work. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Osterman, K. & Kottkamp, R.(1993). Reflective practice for educators.California:Corwin Press, Inc. Retrieved from hhttp://www.itslifejimbutnotasweknowit.org.uk/files/RefPract/Osterman_Kottkamp_extract.pdf