Teacher CRP action research project

Context

Hayden is a second year new educator, with several years additional experience working as a Learning Support Assistant. Sara is an experienced educator who has been teaching for more than 10 years in the ACT and SA.

Bonython Primary School has approximately 400 students from P-6. The school has a diverse range of students with approximately 26% identified as speaking an additional home language (ACARA, 2023). Our classes contained 19 and 18 year 1/2 students, with 4 and 1 EAL/D learners respectively. Teaching at Bonython is arranged under the umbrellas of The Art of Inquiry – 10 Practices for Inquiry Teaching and Learning (Murdoch, 2019). Educators draw on these to plan for learning, assess student growth, collaborate with teams, curate learning spaces, and select and use resources.

Our action research was framed around the idea of how connecting through lifeworlds can facilitate more meaningful relationships. As our students were in the early stages of their schooling journey, we believed that fostering lifeworld-centric dialogue with peers would support the development of a positive learning community.

Doing the action research

At the start of our unit of work we wanted to find out our student’s lifeworlds. We brainstormed what important parts of life might be, for example, family. Students then recorded their different lifeworlds. After this process we thought about how to best build students’ understanding of their own lifeworlds, how they contrast with others’ lifeworlds, and the concept of lifeworlds generally. The student’s engaged in ‘Story Circles,’ small group discussions where students were provided with a question prompt. During this time students would use the question prompt to share about their lifeworlds, for example, ‘What is something you celebrate with your family?’ Students would take turns sharing and then record what people in their group had shared. The purpose was to create deeper connections across the cohort. The story circles were structured in a way to explicitly teach conversational skills; turn taking, listening, speaking clearly and asking questions. It also provided opportunities for students to practise these skills.

During the unit of work we collected the following data: Student reflections, student work samples, teacher journaling, photographs and planning documents.

Observations we made during and after the unit of work were:

• During break times, our students were being more inclusive.
• Friendship groups expanded and there were more conversations taking place.
• During class time, students were more flexible with who they sat next to and didn’t complain when they had to work with different students.
• Over time students noticed that people were less shy, taking turns and being respectful towards people in their group.
• The overall atmosphere in the classroom shifted- it became more positive and more harmonious.