Your 2nd Grade Teacher's Thoughts

From my study of the action research process, I’ve learned that every project can look pretty different and that it isn’t a hugely formal process like academic research. I have informally conducted many small action research projects in the years I’ve been teaching. An example of one is when I created my own classroom behavior management system. During my first year teaching, I struggled with behavioral issues daily. After about a week I realized I needed to change my positive behavior system to something more manageable and something all my students would buy into. Through the help of my mentor teacher, the internet, and my coworkers I came up with a few systems to try. While I did not collect any formal data on the effects of the PBIS system, I collected my own informal data on the effectiveness of the system with my mentor teacher. I have had this same experience many times since I started teaching, where I had a problem or an issue in my class that I studied and then took action to

Looking back on my genius hour project I found that I learned way more about the process and my topic than I ever expected to. Before studying and conducting a genius hour project I knew very little about the process and the potential learning. However, now after I’ve completed my first project I realized I have done many small genius hour projects throughout my lifetime and teaching career. One of my biggest takeaways from the experience has been that genius hour projects are really just structured models of how to be a lifelong learner. The project has instilled in me a new confidence that I can change the way I teach and I can be passionate about learning. Genius hour projects provide learners with the opportunity to study problems that they encounter and want to learn more about. This project provided me the opportunity to study something I really wanted to improve in my teaching. Overall, the project really impacted the way I see learning. It doesn’t always have to be a lengthy me