Final Project Ideas

 

I believe students learn through struggle, a healthy amount of productive struggle. I believe that learning should be made accessible (through scaffolding) to all learners so that all learners can engage in productive struggle (I'm using this to guide the idea that I have about my final project as I was struggling a lot in the brainstorm process).

I thought a lot about this in my Action Practitioner Research class where we were told to design a research question, my question was "What is the impact on students’ engagement with productive struggle in the classroom when the classroom community normalizes uncertainty through the learning pit?"

I broke down my question into sub questions to be able to frame my research:  

• Does engagement with productive struggle increase when students are able to point out where they are within the learning pit?

• What other learning or environmental impacts does the use of the learning pit have on the classroom community?

Knowing that I wanted to lean into my action practitioner research (especially because I already have half of the research project thought out), I wanted to investigate the way that I could meld together technology and media with the learning pit.

I did in fact know that I wanted to use AI to help me ideate to be able to have a succinct project that I can fit into the next week.

Here's a link to the conversation that I had with Claude (more information on the prompt down below).

My idea is to build an app that students can access on their chromebooks at different checkpoints during a math unit. The app/ website will be very student (second grade student) friendly. The app will include an illustrated version of the learning pit with 5 tappable zones "I've got this" (signifying not yet having entered the learning pit), "It's getting tricky" (beginning to descend down the learning pit) "I'm stuck in the pit" (being solidly in the learning pit), "I'm climbing out" (the ascension out of the learning pit) and "I've figured it out" (out of the learning pit).

After students select a zone, data will automatically populate into a pre-made Google Sheet. You might at this point be asking yourself how this will help learning and it all connects to both practicality with me following my action practitioner research, aligns with what I believe about the relationship between productive struggle and learning but also at the same time normalizes the use of the learning pit by normalizing struggle (productive struggle). By attempting to remove a negative connotation from struggle, students can see struggle as something that at the very least is neutral or ideally helps them learn. Another feature of the app or Google Sheet set up is I can easily make a bar graph to show students that other people are also struggling at a certain checkpoint in a unit. Removing solitude in struggle will ideally not only create a bigger sense of community and community help (shout out to Wesch's idea of helping students up the staircase) but also will once again reinforce the normalization of the learning pit as a tool.

Amy's (2024) project inspired me not only because her project surrounded the idea of student engagement (and how to increase it) but also because she was using her work in the action practitioner research class that she took to set the scene for her research and project in this class (much like I'm doing)