How will implementing Interactive Student Notebooks impact the responsibility of my 6th grade English students?

Seminar Title

How will implementing Interactive Student Notebooks impact the responsibility of my 6th grade English students?

Responsibility in the Classroom, Interactive Notebooks, Engagement, Organization

6th Grade

Middle School

Language Arts

All Disciplines

Have you ever been frustrated with students constantly losing work? Do you find yourself upset about having to provide multiple copies of assignments to students? Looking for a way to engage your students through differentiation? Then come learn about the wonderful benefits of Interactive Notebooks! I have found that students have become more engaged, motivated to work, and organized through using Interactive Notebooks, and I look forward to sharing my findings and discussing how using them could impact the classroom environment. My research into improving responsibility in students is focused on middle school, but could be applied to all grade levels, and is applicable to all subject areas.

Intro to AR: A major skill lacking in middle school students is overall responsibility of their learning and behavior. One way to help improve this skill in students is by implementing a tool called Interactive Student Notebooks (ISNs). But as to how Interactive Student Notebooks would assist students in their improvement, I did not know. This notion prompted my research question, “how will implementing Interactive Student Notebooks impact the responsibility of my 6th grade English students?” In my research, I found that students would need to improve in three areas of responsibility in order to improve in the skill as a whole: Engagement, motivation, and organization. To measure how much ISNs were impacting my those three sub-concepts of responsibility in the classroom, I first used a pre- and post- unit survey to assess how students felt about their engagement, motivation, and organization in English class. I also used a missing assignment tally to determine how much more or less organized students were as a result of ISNs. Finally, I took field notes as I observed my students working with the ISNs to see how engaged and organized students were throughout the process. Method and data: My research guided me in understanding how to instruct students on setting up an ISN where they would keep a specifically organized log of their notes and process new information from the notes in their own way. I found that the organization of my students greatly improved as a result of these efforts, and my percentage of missing assignments from students went down exponentially. In addition, because ISNs do involve creativity and hands-on work, I found that my student’s engagement in both the note taking process and the daily work process increased. Finally, as students were able to choose how they first wanted to process new information from the notes, I saw students being more motivated to do well with the work. A downfall of ISNs I noticed, however, was that if options for how to process information weren’t changed up often, students would lose interest and become disengaged and more unmotivated. In addition, sometimes the tasks in the ISN were time consuming and students would become disengaged and unmotivated once again as time went on Conclusion(s): After implementing ISNs and reflecting on the processes that went along with them, I am going to create more options for processing ISN notes and give more responsibility to students for determining how they would like to process the information.