The beginning of positive communication

I starte the positive communication yesterday. I have decided to send home certificates for my focus group as well as calling home. This is going to be a gradual process, meaning that this week I have started with the certificates and next week I will as the positive phone calls or notes home.
Today I realized what the implications of this research could be. Anna is part of my focus group. She comes from a very stressful background of foster care and abuse. She has struggled with behavior and feeling loved and valued. Although Anna has had a hard life she is the only one of her siblings that seems to care about her academic progress.
Her award today was given in response to her cooperative work with her peer during math. Anna worked very hard with her partner to answer some math questions that were hard. It was during this time that she demonstrated excellent behavior and wonderful thinking skills.
At the end of the day when I gave Anna her award, her reaction was priceless. Her face lit up like a child at Christmas who just walked into a room filled with every present she has ever wanted. She was so excited that she moved me to tears.
This is the exact reason for this project, this is why I teach.

Method Discussion

Through that analysis of data for my first method I found that what I am doing is going to help support my research question. For the first time, I am actually very excited about this research. Here is to looking forward to more methods and responses!

Method 1

I conducted my first piece of research today. I had my students fill out a survey regarding their attitude towards school. My results were very interesting. I think that I was most surprised at their response to weather or not they would like a phone call home when they have a great day or get a good grade. I had four students reply that they would never like this.
What I found most interesting though was that my class had an even split of 50% each for liking and disliking school. Finally, the words that were circled regarding their feelings revealed that 15 out of 20 students were worried when they were told the teacher would be calling home.

I find that this has made me think about my own feelings and attitude about school when I was their age. I know that I didn't like school, but it was not because of the school or the teachers. I had many problems with my peers as being the brunt of their meanness.

Overall, I am finidng this interesting.

No progress

I am currently at a standstill because of the uncp email outage. I do not know how to get in touch with Dr. Hart so I have sent a message through blackboard.
So...Dr. Hart if you read this how should I proceed. Do you have any suggestions are needed changes to my survey. I would like to be able to hand in my first write-up on time.
Help........

Research

I have done a lot of research on my communication project. I have even ordered some of the articles from the library and they should be sent to my home. However, I have yet to have them delivered. I ordered them two weeks ago and they have yet to arrive. I do not quite know what to do. Now we are having difficulties with accessing our email and I don't know where to go from here. Any suggestions.

Survey

I have come to realize that creating a survey is a bit more complicated than once thought. I am learning a lot through this project. I have found that simple things can make big changes.

Example
I have a student who is not a part of my focus group on purpose. I felt that including him would only play into his mothers hands of treating him like a baby. Therefore, I have decided to take a different positive communication approach with him. Recently, I have started to praise just very little things and encouraging him to be a good example like I know he can. On Thursday I saw a breakthrough and again today I saw a breakthrough.
On Thursday, he was sitting across from another student who was having great difficulty keeping his feet to himself. During this time he was kicking my other student. At the beginning of the year, student A would have kicked back and caused a problem. However, he instead chose to move himself out of the kicking line of fire. This helped to defuse student B who was kicking.
Today, I was informed of a wonderful behavior decision he made on Friday when I was not there. My assistant, who is aware of my project, informed me of what a wonderful job he did in making the decision. We both praised him and talked about how grown up he is becoming and what a leader he is starting to become.
After these two instances, I am concluding that the more positive encouragment and feedback I give to this student the greater the opportunity that he will continue to make such progress. I am very excited with these outcomes.

Well...

So my feedback on the student survey was not as good as I though it would be. I have a lot of work to do on that matter. I am a little stressed about this project. I am feeling overwhelmed and am just struggling. I am in need of direction. Therefore, class tomorrow it is. I think that having the opportunity to meet with Dr. Hart with be very beneficial. Here is to looking at more enlightenment. (is that a word)......Wish me luck!

Success

Ahh, the feeling of success. I successfully, yes me, found research and ordered it from the library. It will arrive this week. I am so excited with my accomplishment! I have also designed two surveys, one for parents and one for students. I will be submitting them for review. Oh what a great weekend!!!

a reflection

After class on Wednesday night, I have taken a few days to really think about what Dr. Hart and I discussed. My research is going to take a slight change. I am going to look at a focus group for attitude change with the increase of parental positive communication. I have narrowed my group to five students that I believe will greatly benefit from this type of communication. I am also going to use my students to help with the parent communication. We will be working on a weekly newsletter. This letter to the parents will be written 75% by students and 25% by me. The students portion will include a relfection of what has happened over the course of the week and some of the things that they have learned. The rest of the news letter will be written by me as an outlook of what is to come. I am very interested to know what the reaction of the students and parents will be during this time.