Summary:

Group 2s third data meeting went well with a lot of great discussion and
collaboration. We met in Google chat, as we have done for the first two meetings.
This meeting ended up being our longest one at two and a half hours, but that was
a result of the details necessary for the content rather than any issue in
communication or focus. We were successful in relating the learning gaps with
instructional gaps and ultimately coming up with our learning goals and evaluation
methods.
After the holiday weekend, we were able to coordinate our schedules to meet
on Monday evening and worked on the tables through google docs. Brandi set up
the tables for us and got us started by inputting the learning and instructional gap
table from our second meeting. Based off of the significance and prominence from
meeting #2, we were able to start prioritizing the learning gaps in relation to how
they relate to our exploratory question. The most important aspects were our
students difficulty with written expression and weak vocabularies.
We aligned difficulty with written expression with the need to increase writing
in the classroom. We felt that the correlation between the two was obvious as this
would allow the majority of the students who show difficulty with writing more time
to ask for help and to find ways to express what they would like to communicate.
As a result of the presented research, the instruction that we decided on was to
have students work with a partner to dictate and discuss their thoughts before
transferring it into writing. The goal is for 70% of US Government students to write
a response paragraph with 2 or 3 details by the end of the first quarter. This will be
measured by an essay with 2 or 3 details which will be graded through a rubric.
A weak vocabulary was the other top priority learning gap, which aligned with
a variation of response types to increase student engagement. There was a lot of
research provided by each member of the group that gave us direction for our
instruction. This ultimately led us to a combination of the research ideas. For
instruction, we decided that project-based vocabulary instruction with emphasis on
incorporating discussion of the vocabulary and using high quality literature to
introduce vocabulary would help reach our goal. The goal is for US Government
students to participate in vocabulary based warm-up activities 80% of the days
during the unit and score a minimum of 70% on the unit quiz. This will be evaluated
through participation in daily warm-up activities and completion of a unit quiz.
We had the most difficulty identifying an instructional strategy to help solve
the learning gap of weak context clues skills. This aligned with the instructional gap
of needing more discussion time, and the research showed that student discussion
using vocabulary will help improve context clues skills. From this, Patrick suggested
the use of Socratic seminar. Once educating a few members of the group, we were
able to decide on using the Socratic seminar as a collaborative intellectual dialogue
facilitated with open-ended questions about a text. Our learning goal is for at least
90% of students to introduce/respond to at least 1 talking point during 3 out of 5
small group Socratic seminar sessions in a given week. The students will be
evaluated on their participation in the small group Socratic seminar.

Our exploratory question, does willingness to participate impact assessment

grades, will be answered as we work on improving participation with our students.
Research showed that comfort with written expression can be improved by allowing
students to communicate their thoughts orally before putting them down on paper.
We also wanted to improve on vocabulary as the research showed that a lack in
vocabulary hinders the students participation as it lowers their confidence, leading
them to choose not to participate. Improving their vocabularies will improve
participation, and hopefully lead to improved assessment grades, represented
through the unit quiz. Lastly, in order to build confidence in the students
willingness to participate, we have them working in small group Socratic seminars
so the anxiety of speaking in front of large groups will not be an issue when sharing
their thoughts.