The writing of an eFolio was a partially new experience for me, but fully unknown. In my younger years, I was an incredibly reflective and passionate journal writer. I would end every day by writing in my journal all the thoughts and feelings that I had experienced that day. From this, my love of writing sprung up naturally and I started a long relationship with words and weaving them in ways that people would find ingenious and entertaining. Upon entering the MET program (which I will hopefully graduate from after completion of this course), I was slightly taken aback at the difference between academic writing and accessing the content that was being examined. For me, many times, the tasks seemed strictly constrained and as someone who thinks more creatively and less logically, I felt hindered. Even this reflection at first threw me for a loop, as I was struggling with how to adequately analyze the entire process of writing an eFolio yet still weave it together into an academic theme.

Yet, when I take a step back and look at my journey through this course and also the MET program as a whole, it has been an experience that has asked me to push through the discomfort and even to be comfortable with the feeling of not being fully comfortable. As an ELA teacher, I am not routinely used to the ideas that come along with Math and Science, yet I have enjoyed looking at how all the subjects can be integrated together and pushing through the unknown to arrive at a deeper understanding that can help benefit my students and my classroom.

With that said, I have chosen more of a framework and less of an analogy to analyze my eFolio, as the process makes much more sense to me by looking at how my focus shifted throughout the learning. The framework that I am going to be using comes from the college readiness program AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination). My current school is an AVID certified school and I recently attended a training about how to help prepare students already in Kindergarten for college readiness. One of the strategies for teachers that they advocate for is called WICOR. WICOR stands for Writing to Learn, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading to Learn (Drumright, Pengra-Anderson, & Potts, 2016, p. 8).

Writing to Learn is concerned with the process of writing down thought patterns and reflections in order to lead the learner to deeper knowledge and to help aid the processing of information. Inquiry is the process of asking questions and searching for answers to solve problems. Collaboration is just as it sounds, with the focus being on learning in community and adding to each other’s learning. Organization refers to having a set way of constructing and categorizing time, information, and materials to make them accessible. Finally, Reading to learn is analyzing and gleaning information through reading strategies from scholarly texts. Through the use of each of these categories in a lesson, teachers are actively putting the focus on college readiness for students. As I sat in the training room listening to the presenters advocate for this program, it struck me how easily these ideas fall into the different processes and theories that were examined this semester. I also realized that depending on the lesson, I applied more or fewer of these strategies into my learning and my responses. As the semester progressed, my posts gained more and more aspects of WICOR in authentic ways that would benefit students. For this reason, I will be examining each module based on the different aspects of WICOR that were utilized to show my progression through the course and to demonstrate the depth of knowledge addressed throughout my eFolio.

At the very beginning of the course, the emphasis was all on Writing to Learn and Organization for me. The first thing that I always want to do with each course is to get a lay of the land, and the creation of an eFolio was part of that process for me. This was the first blog that I had created for the MET program, though not my first blog ever. Setting up my eFolio and going through the course material took up my time in those early days. I will be honest that I was very unsure about this course, as I struggled to understand the organization of the different components (i.e. Canvas, Blogs, eFolio, and finding all the readings and resources that we needed to access and use throughout the semester.) However, through emails with the professor and with a few of my classmates, I was able to begin to understand how the course was organized and hit the ground running. With that said, confusion over organization will continue to remain a struggle throughout this course. Through the penning of the Auto e-Graphy, I was able to reflect on my past experiences with technology and start to get a feel for how the course would be run. Writing the auto e-graphy allowed me chance to really settle in to the course and to get to know each other and connect with them in a more relaxed way. It is worth saying that this auto e-graphy was probably one of my favorite pieces to write, as it was more creative, narrative focused and less academic focused.

As Module A moved on, and we moved into the Conceptual Challenges and Unpacking Assumptions, Writing to Learn and Inquiry came to the forefront as addressing the inner thought of students became the focus. It strikes me that Inquiry and Writing to Learn are two of the biggest tools that can be used to help break through conceptual challenges and misconceptions. Through looking at videos and reading articles about the conceptual challenges that are common, as well as reflecting on our own personal experiences of having misconceptions, I was lead to think in different ways about the students in my classroom. Many times, when I am feeling frustrated that students are not grasping simple concepts, it could possibly be that they have internalized the wrong information. One salient idea that sticks with me was from Gooding & Metz (2011) who classified misconceptions into five different categories: preconceived notions, no scientific beliefs, conceptual misunderstandings, vernacular misconceptions, and factual misconceptions. These categories would be great to have on a sticky note when tutoring students to help remind myself what they may be struggling with. The way to help prevent this are the same methods that can be used to combat this phenomenon. Writing to learn, coupled together with verbalizing thoughts, can be a powerful tool in the classroom that will make something that is a completely hidden and internalized process and make it visible and external, as championed by Shapiro (1988). By writing about the conceptual challenges that students experience, I was also reflecting on my own practices of processing information and questioning what kinds of misconceptions I may have internalized. The process of questioning and writing responses to those questions could be used in the classroom the exact same way that it was used in my creation of these posts. Through writing, students would be able to see connections and explain their thinking in ways that the teacher could read and understand. Through this reading, the teacher would be able to identify areas of concern and confusion, ask more questions, and start the cycle over again. These baseline tools and ideas would continue to circle around and come back to shape later posts, and I found myself frequently thinking back to the misconceptions seen in the videos in later modules when theories were discussed.

Conducting the interview of a fellow educator hit almost every single aspect of WICOR, making it an activity that I am also considering implement in my yearly syllabus. I also found that this was one of the activities that hit closest to home for me and really inspired me to continue one. My framing issues paper was going to be all about robotic implementation, so I requested one of the robotics coaches at my school to be the subject for the interview.  Before the interview, through the group formation of the questions, the Collaboration and Inquiry piece had already been achieved. Reading to Learn also was beneficial to me, as some of my questions were inspired from the articles that I was already preparing for my Framing Issues paper. However, by talking with a fellow educator, further collaboration was done and our conversation was beneficial to both parties as we were able to discuss and talk more about how robotics implementation could benefit the students in our classrooms. The interview was Organized together into a salient abstract and then I was able to synthesize and analyze the interview in a piece that was Writing to Learn through reflection. This reflection piece I found was even more beneficial to me than the standard blog post that was posted for the class, as it allowed me the chance to think deeper about the responses and the implication that it has for my own personal profession.

By the time the Framing Issues paper came around, I was feeling fairly confident in the choice of topic that I was going to be examining. While it is not officially a part of the eFolio, I am still including it in this analysis, as it did shape many of my other posts as well. The paper focused initially on the Reading to Learn and Organization parts of WICOR as I was searching through databases, finding articles, making citations, and reading to learn what the authors were finding in their research. The Organization component continued to play a strong role through the processes of writing a proposal and then finally penning the paper.  Also, APA continued to be a struggle for mine in this program, much to the shame of my ELA teacher heart. Articulating my findings in a comprehensible way as I examined how robotics implementation could be achieved and progressed through a school was the crowning Writing to Learn of this course for me. When I had the read the articles, I felt like I had a fairly solid grasps of what the material was saying. However, it was not until I was able to synthesize it together into something tangible that I was able to see gaps in what I had understood and felt confident sharing it with others. The process of understanding and finding gaps through writing is a perfect example of Shapiro’s idea of verbalizing thinking to locate misconceptions (1988). This Framing Issues paper was passed on to my administrators and the robotics team at my school and we are currently working to make a solid articulation plan for robotics next year.

Reading and Writing to Learn was a strong focus of the Design of TELEs and PCK/TPCK pieces in the eFolio. The readings that were included went a long way to explain and to illuminate various ideas of planning a lesson that would include technology. Thinking about how a space/classroom would function effectively with technology really set up the following lessons where various TELEs were examined. One specific struggle that came to the forefront for me was the dates of the different articles that we were using. While much of the foundational ideas were unchanged in these articles, it did take some mental work and creativity (Inquiry) to update and envision how these same ideas may look in a modern classroom. This theme would continue throughout the next few lessons and be a mental block that I would have to continually push to the back of my mind in order to access the information and truly Read to Learn. With that said, my Teaching with TPCK post was highly beneficial to me as it forced me to deconstruct a lesson to see all the moving and interdependent parts of TPCK that go into every single lesson (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). It also was a prime example of learning from experience and forming comprehensive knoweldge, not simply surface level understanding (Shulman, 1987).

The posts on Anchored Instruction, SKI/WISE, LfU, and T-GEM were pieces that strongly lent themselves towards inquiry in the classroom, and while they were all similar in many aspects, they each brought their own unique point of view to inquiry and learning in the classroom. My two personal favorites were T-GEM and LfU, as I found them the most intuitive to use and the ones that presented the most straightforward benefit to students. Both of these theories also took into account the ideas of Park & Park (2012) who cautioned against using a pure PBL program lest gaps in knowledge and understanding appear. The process of Anchored Instruction and WISE could be useful in the classroom, yet the tech connected to them in the lessons seemed too outdated to be feasible for ease of use in the classroom today. Furthermore, LfU and T-GEM easily can envelope the ideas of Anchored Instruction and SKI. Learning for Use is a perfect example of Inquiry and Reading to Learn, as it emphasizes real world application and using tech and knowledge together in authentic ways. The lessons that I created for this post is my personal favorite lesson that I designed in this course, and will definitely be included in my Creative Writing course next year. The lesson contains all the aspects of WICOR in a very authentic, accessible way through the use of the Google Suite, as is stated as one of the benefits by Perkins et al. (2010). T-GEM is also a brilliant framework to follow as it is Inquiry at its finest. Making guesses, evaluating them, and then changing them based on data is the process of inquiry merely stated in different ways. Collaboration is built into the these theories as student work together to ask and evaluate their learning. In fact, every aspect of WICOR is built into the frameworks of LfU and T-GEM, asking students to think deeply, work together, express their ideas in writing, and take in new information through reading and questioning (Edelson, 2001). It is of special note that my synthesis post received a lot of positive feedback as a visual representation of the different methods we had been learning. This was also a much more focused way of synthesizing information for me that allowed creativity back into the process.

The end of this course is where I feel it and I really hit our stride, which could be evidenced by the fact that I found the readings and responses more valuable in Module C. Module C was much more updated and seemed to be able to seamlessly be integrated into the classroom use. Embodied Learning, Knowledge Diffusion, and Information Visualization were great additions that could work hand in hand with T-GEM and LfU. They all would work tougher well to help support the active Inquiry of the students, Collaboration, and responding to what they have learned. Info-Vis, in particular, is a fresh take on Writing to Learn as it uses simulations to help express and bring to life concepts from which the students manipulate and learn. Embodied Learning is a great Organizational strategy as it helps students to organize information in their mind and to remember it through motion or internalizing information. Knowledge Diffusion focuses on Collaboration as the emphasis is on group learning and letting the learning of the group infiltrate and benefit each member. Through working with each of these in Module C, I could feel my mind starting to race with ideas of how to make each of my lessons WICORized and more impactful for the students.

Finally, the resource forum was a great chance to enact ideas of Knowledge Diffusion and Collaboration as we all shared ideas of resource that could enhance and embody the different theories and frameworks that we had been studying. The final entry of choosing one of the resources and analyzing it was surprisingly easier than the earlier posts, as I felt there was so many more ways to look at each resource to determine its validity and possible uses. This process of Writing to Learn was truly valuable as the process of writing forced me to think in a more critical way about a resource that I may have just implemented without a second thought normally.

This entire eFolio has been one giant activity of Writing to Learn, but it is a testament to the power of writing and putting into words your thoughts in order to process, inquire, and reflect. I could not be happier that I chose this option for the final assignment as it really gave me an authentic chance to reflect back on my own learning and to revisit the beginning to see how it all fits together and comes full circle. Through all the elements of these lessons, I feel more equipped to update what I have learned and WICORize more of my lessons, even if they area not necessarily in the math and science classrooms.

 

 

References

Drumright, M., Pengra-Anderson, K., & Potts, T. (2016). AVID elementary foundations: A schoolwide implementation resource. San Diego, CA: AVID Press.

Gooding, J., & Metz, B. (2011). From misconceptions to conceptual change. The Science Teacher, 78(4), 34.Edelson, D.C. (2001). Learning-for-use: A framework for the design of technology-supported inquiry activities. Journal of Research in Science Teaching,38(3), 355-385. http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/1098-2736(200103)38:3<355::aid-tea1010>3.0.CO;2-M

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers college record, 108(6), 1017.

Park, K., & Park, S. (2012). Development of professional engineers’ authentic contexts in blended learning environments. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(1).

Perkins, N., Hazelton, E., Erickson, J., & Allan, W. (2010). Place-based education and geographic information systems: Enhancing the spatial awareness of middle school students in Maine. Journal of Geography, 109(5), 213-218. http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1080/00221341.2010.501457

Shapiro, B. L. (1988). What children bring to light: Towards understanding what the primary school science learner is trying to do. Developments and dilemmas in science education, 96-120.

Shulman, L.S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching. The foundations of a new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1)1-23.