An action inquiry into work place communication

Hello

I am currently at a secondary school in West Sussex working as a teaching assistant in the special educational needs department and in my third and final year of my degree in Learning , Technology and Research. I am doing an action inquiry into work place communication and will be looking at my body language in the work setting, I will aim to come up with a new improvement which i can take into a second cycle to see if using new and improved methods from the resources on body language will improve my effectiveness in keeping students more focused in class.

I would appreciate any view or suggestions that anyone might have on this and will look to use this forum as a way of disseminating my findings to aid in validating my work

Thank you for listening and constructive comments welcome. I will attach my proposal if anyone is interested in looking at it, it is still very much in working progress and does require some changes from the tutors who are currently looking at it

Sue

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Attachments:

Module Review and Planning CB330005S Final Document.doc, 146 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Alison Margaret Miller on October 31, 2009 at 8:24pm

Hi Susan, Good luck with this, it sounds a very interesting area of study. My own background is in Movement Studies and I can see how this action research is likely to produce visible and measurable changes in student teacher interactions, with the added twist of special needs thrown in :) I will be interested to read of your learning journey should you decide to post anything further. All the best, Alison, from Hong Kong!

Permalink Reply by Bob Zenhausern on November 1, 2009 at 10:02am

I read your preliminary proposal and some things are not clear to me.

You say you are a teaching assistant. I am from the US and I am not sure exactly what your role is. I assume you have enough interaction with the students so your intervention has a reasonable chance of success.

You say you work with special education students. What type of students do you work with? If the group is heterogeneous might your manipulation work better with some students than others?

I am not clear how you intend to incorporate Kolb's model into your work. What style are you? Do you plan to determine the style of the students and look for individual differences in the effectiveness of your approach depending on a match mismatch of style?

I like your concept and would like to learn more on how you plan to implement it and the results you find.

Permalink Reply by susan knight on November 1, 2009 at 11:53am

Hi Bob

Thank you for your response. At the moment I am waiting for my proposal to be given the green light by the tutors but I work with KS3 and KS4 students that's 11 - 16 year olds, the majority of my work is in class room settings working with students who have behavioural issues, so the majority of my work involves keeping these students focused enabling them to stay in class without disruption to other students.

In terms of interaction yes I have plenty of that working one to one with some of the students means that my job is to keep them focused on the subject matter whilst trying to control their behaviour in class, this can be an arduous task at times but quite fun as well.

Kolbs model is not a complex model to follow hence my choice it will enable me to use feelings, how i perceive myself, watching which will be the observations of my body language in lessons to see if my interaction matches the material i will source on body language, concluding my findings will be matching what i have read and from observations on my own behaviour what i have learnt and looking at what I can change to make an improvement in my working practices.

Does this make sense to you now. If you have any suggestions on this I would be interested to hear from you again I am hoping that I can disseminate my work into class 2 and get support from people such as yourself in the form of evaluation and feedback

I am very nervous about how I am going to do this so I will rely on relevant suggestions during the next 10 weeks

Thanks again

Sue

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