Sarah Geist

TE 801
Dr. Moore
12/13/2020

Project 2: Understanding Students’ Resistance

Part 1: Propose and Describe Your Case

Student 1: Merlin (focal student)

In Merlin’s Honors English 11 class, all the students signed a participation agreement at

the beginning of the year that detailed our expectation that every student contribute to each class

discussion. Because of online learning and the state’s two-way communication requirement,

student participation is recorded for attendance. In order to be marked present for that day,

students must participate at least once in each class discussion. Discussions are generally based

on comprehension and analysis questions that the students complete as they read. They are also

required to have their cameras on unless they have communicated to either me or my mentor

teacher that they have a technology or other barrier. Merlin consistently participates once during

each class discussion, but generally does not share his ideas beyond the required amount. In our

discussion of the second half of The Scarlet Letter, I decided to remind students about the

participation requirement because several students, including Merlin, still needed to contribute to

the discussion as we neared the end of class. After this reminder, Merlin was the first student to

volunteer to share his ideas, which were well-developed and thoughtful. However, that was the

only time he participated during the discussion. He also frequently has his camera turned off at

the beginning of class and does not turn it on until it is his turn to speak. Usually, once he turns

his camera on, he keeps it on for the rest of class. At the beginning of the school year, students

completed an “About You Questionnaire.” In his submission, Merlin stated that he enjoys
reading and that English is his favorite subject in school. He also explained that he likes it when

teachers include videos and other fun activities in the classwork.

Focusing on Merlin for this project will help me figure out how to get students to expand

their potential. Merlin, like many students, is doing fine in my class, but is capable of engaging

and doing more than the required minimum. Particularly in a time when grades and test scores

are emphasized so much, I want to develop my ability to get students excited about their

learning. I dream of a class in which students participate because they want to and not because

they have to.

Student 2: Theodore

Theodore participates very well in class, often offering complex and developed insights

about the text(s). Despite his clear understanding of the course content, Theodore is currently

failing due to a large number of missing assignments. He is currently missing 2 reading quizzes,

Native American fiction and nonfiction response questions, and transcendentalism response

questions. My mentor teacher does not accept any late work after the first month of school, so

Theodore cannot get any points from the work that he has not yet completed. We do give each

student 2 late paper passes, one per quarter, which give the students an additional week to finish

one assignment of their choice. After speaking with my mentor teacher about his missing work

and his grade, Theodore decided to use his first late paper pass to finish and get credit for

response questions to “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and modern-day shaming/scarlet

letter articles. His responses for this assignment are very thoughtful and went well beyond the

required number of sentences, and he earned full credit. In addition to the missing work,

Theodore’s attendance is not the best. He is in the Career Center program, which does create

scheduling conflicts for some students, but Theodore has assured me on multiple occasions that
his Career Center schedule does not overlap with our class time. Theodore has a habit of joining

the Google Meet, and then leaving immediately after I say anything pertaining to an

assignment/reading that students needed to do before class. For example, on the day the students

presented drawings they did in response to The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,

Theodore was in the Google Meet at the beginning of class, but left the Meet after I explained

how we would determine the order or presentations. He did not return to the Meet that day. This

causes his to miss important discussions and explanations for how to complete class assignments.

Both I and my mentor teacher have sent many emails to Theodore, his mother, and his counselor,

voicing our concerns about his progress in the class. We have not received any responses to our

emails, but have spoken to Theodore after class twice. In both of those meetings, we have gone

over missing and future class assignments, focusing on helping him get caught up.

Focusing on Theodore for this project will help me try to figure out how to help students

who do not struggle in class, but who have challenges outside of class. While I don’t believe in

assigning homework for the sake of giving extra work, there are some instances, especially in an

English class, where students need to come to class having read the assigned texts and prepared

for discussion and/or relevant activities. I do not currently know what to do when a student does

not do that reading or other assignments that are important for their learning. This behavior

occurs largely outside of the classroom, so I feel like there is very little that I can do to help. But

I refuse to accept that fact, and hope to learn some strategies that I can use for supporting

students outside of the classroom and class time.

Part 2: Form Hypotheses and Identify the Stakes

Hypothesis 1: The student does not actively participate in discussion because he does not feel

like a part of the classroom community.

 For the most part, the classroom community is quite close, given that we are currently

online. Many of the students have been in honors classes before, so they were already friends

before beginning my class. Additionally, about 2/3 of the students in my focus class are in band

together, so they are very close. Merlin is not in band and is the only student in my class who is

on the football team. He wrote that he is on the football, basketball, and baseball teams in his

About Me Questionnaire. As far as I have been able to tell, he is not close friends with anyone in

my focus class. Furthermore, Merlin is one of three black students in my focus class, and the

only black male. He may feel isolated from his classmates because he does not have a lot in

common with them and because many of them are already so close. It is possible that this causes

him to avoid participation beyond what is required. We have not done very much group work

yet, so it is difficult to tell if his participation is different when he is in a smaller group than when

we are doing whole class discussion. The stakes are pretty high for him whenever he

participates, since he does not know how the other students will react to his opinions and/or

ideas. He may feel afraid of being judged, or of being further separated from his classmates. By

only participating when required, he avoids potentially being thought of differently by his

classmates while still gaining the points he needs to succeed in the class. However, if Merlin

achieves his dream of becoming a professional chef, Merlin will need to be able to communicate

with people in the kitchen with him, even if those colleagues are not his close friends. He will

also need to be able to break into social groups that exist before he joins the workforce. By

limiting his participation, Merlin is losing the opportunity to practice a “specific skill [that will]

allow [him] to live, play, work, exist in ways that are measurably better” (Minor 21). For my

stakes, I worry that altering my teaching strategies to directly help Merlin could cause him to feel

singled out or could cause the other students to feel ignored.

Hypothesis 2: The student is not interested or engaged in the material, but participates minimally

and turns in work so he can pass the class.

So far in class, we have studied The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,

transcendentalism, The Scarlet Letter, and The Awakening. Of these, The Scarlet Letter and The

Awakening are particularly difficult for students to connect with, as they involve women from

long ago struggling with issues not normally faced by teenagers. I know that students have more

to say and are more willing to participate in educational ways when they are interested in the

material (Tovani, “Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?”). It is possible that Merlin does not

participate because he does not have anything to say about the text. The text(s) might not

interest him. For example, we recently had the students watch the movie Saved! and compare it

to The Scarlet Letter. For the question about the Scarlet Letter, which has an adult woman from

hundreds of years ago as its protagonist, Merlin wrote one, relatively vague sentence. For his

response to Saved!, which has a teenage girl from modern times as its protagonist, Merlin wrote

four very detailed sentences. His engagement with the more modern, more relevant text is clear,

whereas his engagement with The Scarlet Letter is not. From his About You Questionnaire, I

know that Cedric enjoys multimodal texts, such as videos. It is possible that he wrote a lot more

about his reaction to Saved! because his engagement was higher and he had more to say about

that text. The stakes for Merlin involve time. By limiting his participation, Merlin gains more

time to spend on things he actually enjoys, like sports, cooking, and watching movies. In order

to participate extensively, Merlin would need to give up some of that time in order to think about

the text and prepare more for discussion. Whenever he participates, he risks showing that he is

not engaging with the text. As the teacher, Merlin’s behavior makes it difficult for me to

facilitate interesting, authentic discussions, since I need to make sure that every student
participates to earn attendance. Having to individually call on Merlin to speak makes it more

difficult for me to facilitate discussion and could cause other students to think that I am mean for

making every student talk.

Part 3: Develop Alternatives for Action and Make an Action Plan

Hypothesis 1: The student does not actively participate in discussion because he does not feel

like a part of the classroom community.

 Alternative for Action A: Try to ask attendance questions that emphasize Merlin’s

interests.

o Merits: These questions would allow Merlin to share more about himself with his

classmates and would cause the other students to get to know him better. He may

find that he has more in common with some of the students in the class than he

thinks he does. This would possibly make him more comfortable participating in

class.

o Drawbacks: Attendance questions may not be enough to help Merlin feel like a

part of the class community. They also tend to be more surface level, which may

not be sufficient to make Merlin feel comfortable sharing more personal ideas

during class discussion.

o Risks: If I don’t choose attendance questions carefully, Merlin may realize that I

am trying to include him more in the classroom community, which could cause

him to feel singled out or further distance him from the other students in the class.

Some questions could also cause other students to feel like their interests are

being ignored.

 Alternative for Action B: Do more small group work with random groups.
 o Merits: Small groups can make it easier for shy students to share their ideas, since

there are fewer students with the potential to judge them. Because there are fewer

students, it also allows students to talk more in the same amount of time. Random

groups allow Merlin to work with different students every time and are more

likely to split up tight-knit groups of friends. This gives Merlin the chance to get

to know his classmates better and become a part of the classroom community.

o Drawbacks: Since we haven’t done much small group work yet, I do not know if

Merlin’s participation is different with a small group compared to with the entire

class. Random groups may force Merlin to work with students that he is not very

comfortable with yet, causing his participation to be at a similar level as it is in

whole class discussion.

o Risks: I cannot control random groups, so students who may feel uncomfortable

working with each other might be placed in the same group, potentially stifling

discussion and causing distress in some students.

 Alternative for Action C: Do more small group work with groups that the students

choose.

o Merits: In addition to the merits of small group work that I describe in the

previous alternative for action, student made groups allow students to work with

their friends, the people that they are the most comfortable sharing with. This

allows Merlin to work with those students that he is closest with and may make

him more eager to share his ideas.

o Drawbacks: Because of the type of discussions we have done so far, I do not

know if small groups increase Merlin’s participation. Student choice groups limit
 students to only working with their friends, which prevents the class as a whole

from building a closer community.

o Risks: Whenever students make their own groups, there is the chance that one or

more students will be left out and need the teacher to find a group for them. This

is potentially embarrassing for students and forces them to work with students that

they know did not choose to work with them. This could negatively affect both

Merlin’s feeling of inclusion and his participation.

Hypothesis 2: The student is not interested or engaged in the material, but participates minimally

and turns in work so he can pass the class.

 Alternative for Action A: Include more multimodal texts.

o Merits: Multimodal texts tend to be more engaging and accessible for students

because they allow students to interact with the text using more than one of their

senses. Students with different learning strengths and strategies are more likely to

find their specific learning strengths addressed by multimodal texts. For Merlin,

who explained that he enjoys watching videos for class, multimodal texts may

increase his engagement and interest in the course material.

o Drawbacks: I don’t have a ton of choice in the texts I teach right now, so it will be

difficult for me to incorporate new multimodal texts into the curriculum. For

older more obscure texts, like The Awakening, there are often not any multimodal

texts available, so I would need to create those, which is increasingly difficult

during a global pandemic.

o Risks: Introducing multimodal remixes of focus texts may increase the students’

workload, which could cause them to feel stressed and potentially disengage
 further. I need to be very careful not to overwhelm students by introducing a ton

of additional supplementary texts.

 Alternative for Action B: Find ways to connect the issues in the text to modern day

problems that teenagers face.

o Merits: This would help my students relate more to the characters, which

increases both their comprehension and engagement. It is much easier to care

about the lessons of a text when those lessons can be applied to one’s old life.

Relating texts to young adult experiences could increase Merlin’s enjoyment of

the texts, allowing him to read for pleasure in addition to reading for homework.

o Drawbacks: Some texts are very difficult to relate to the lives of adolescents. As

a young black boy, Merlin does not have much in common with the middle-aged,

white, historical woman protagonist of The Awakening. Additionally, while it is

undeniably important for students to see themselves in the texts they read, it is

also important for them to be able to empathize with characters that are nothing

like them. Depending on how I frame it, relating the text to the issue of modern

teenagers may send the message that they only need to care about those that they

have something in common with.

o Risks: Doing this requires me to make assumptions about the issues that teenagers

today face. It risks me potentially portraying adolescence as one thing, when in

reality it is a myriad of personalities, challenges, and experiences.

Action Plan

Since I already do attendance questions nearly every day, I believe that alternative for

action 1A is something I can reasonably do to include Merlin in the classroom community. I

definitely think I can include some questions around the football season and Thanksgiving food,

which relate to some of Merlin’s interests but are also common enough topics that the other

students should feel included as well. Due to the size of the class and the relative superficiality

of the attendance questions, I do not believe that this plan will be enough to make Merlin a part

of the classroom community, so I also intend to try using small group work.

I believe that small group work will help Merlin get to know his classmates and

eventually lead to an increase in participation. Small groups take away some of the pressure that

he may be feeling when asked to share his ideas with the entire class. They also give him more

chances to speak. Of the two alternatives for action related to small groups, I prefer 1B over 1C.

Practically, it takes a very long time to manually put students in breakout rooms in Google Meet.

This waiting time could cause students to switch out of school mode, which is already incredibly

difficult for students to enter while learning from home. More importantly, the risk of certain

students, including Merlin, being excluded when students choose their own groups is too large. I

never want a student to feel like they are not liked or wanted by their classmates. I like random

groups because it means that students work with different people every time, potentially helping

Merlin become closer with all of his classmates instead of a select few. If 1B proves to be

ineffective, I may reconsider alternative 1C, but for now, I plan to only use random grouping

strategies.

Because I do not have a lot of control over what texts I teach, both alternatives for action

2A and 2B will be difficult for me to implement. My ability to effectively use multimodal texts

and relate texts to my students’ lives depends on conversations that I have with my mentor

teacher and on the focus text for each unit. If done carefully, however, the risks are very small

compared to the potential increase in interest and engagement for Merlin. Both alternatives for
action are things I already try to do in my teaching, so I plan to continue doing as much as I can

to make the curriculum relevant and engaging for my students.

The next unit we will be studying in class is a book club unit. Each of the students

randomly received one of six possible books, all focusing around African American stories, at

the beginning of the year. The students will be put into groups based on the text they are

reading. I think that this unit will be a good opportunity for me to observe the effects of small

groups on Merlin’s participation. I also think that this group of texts will be much easier for me

relate to modern issues of racism and identity. I hope that Merlin will be able to see himself in

the texts from this unit more than he has been able to so far in class.

Part 4: Evaluate

Over the course of this project, my Honors English 11 focus class finished a unit about

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which I planned and implemented in its entirety, and began a

book club unit centering around African American language and stories, which my mentor

teacher planned and I implemented.

For The Awakening unit, we had three days of discussion solely focused on the text. The

first day began with an activity in which the students created memes connecting one of the four

-isms (realism, naturalism, regionalism, feminism) we were studying to The Awakening.

Students worked in four random small groups to make their memes, then joined as a whole class

to present their memes and engage in a more general discussion about the first part of the book.

The second day was very similar to previous discussions we have had in class. Students received

reading guides with discussion questions that we used to direct our conversation. The third day,

which focused entirely on the ambiguous and rather shocking ending of the novel, involved a

take a stance activity on a Jamboard. Students placed sticky notes with their initials along a line
based on their response to two questions about Edna’s decisions at the end of the novel, then

explained why they put their sticky notes where they did in a whole class discussion. Students

also completed their first long term writing assignment for the semester, which required them to

choose a literary device from the text and connect it to one of the four -isms we studied in class.

Students participated in a writing conference, in which I placed them in breakout rooms based on

their ideas for the assignment and students worked together to formulate claims they could use in

their writing. Some students also earned extra credit for attending an optional peer review

session. At the end of the unit, students did a reflection journal about their writing and

participated in a whole class discussion about their writing processes.

For the book club unit, students are divided into seven groups based on the novel they are

reading. Books were handed out randomly at the beginning of the semester. Instead of breakout

rooms, groups were assigned a specific time slot (approximately 15 minutes) during the class

period in which their group would meet to discuss their text(s). My mentor teacher and I led the

discussion for the first of six book clubs and will slowly reduce our involvement over time in

favor of the students taking more responsibility for their discussion and learning. Before

beginning book clubs, students watched the documentary American Tongues to prepare them for

the various dialects and sociolects they would encounter in their texts. They completed

comprehension and discussion questions and participated in a whole class discussion about

language difference and discrimination. Students are also working on a Regional Literacies

Research Project, which asks them to choose a state and create a presentation with information

about the language communities in that state. This will be the final project for the unit.

Before this project, Merlin participated in class only to the extent that was required. He

often needed a reminder of the requirement before he shared his ideas in whole class discussion.
Since this project and the two most recent units, Merlin’s participation has increased to slightly

beyond the required minimum, but I have not noticed any drastic changes in his behavior.

In the first part of my action plan, I decided to include more attendance check questions

that directly related to Merlin’s interests. I was hoping that this would help him feel more

included in the classroom community and therefore increase his willingness to share his ideas.

The discussion heavy structure of The Awakening unit meant that I didn’t have many

opportunities to do this activity. We only do attendance questions on days when there is no

discussion, so I didn’t end up doing any attendance questions during the entire unit. We did,

however, have a pet day in the middle of The Awakening unit, in which students could introduce

their pets to their classmates. Many of the students, including Merlin, seemed very excited for

pet day. Although he was one of the last to do so, Merlin did volunteer to show the class his dog,

which is a very large pitbull named Rocky. This was the first time in class that Merlin

volunteered to speak in whole class discussion when it was not required. Pet day highlights one

of the benefits of remote instruction, which is that students can see more of each other’s daily

lives. Many of my students are feeling very isolated, so it was wonderful to have an opportunity

to connect and learn more about each other’s live and families outside of school. My mentor

teacher got to introduce her dogs as well, which has helped the students get to know one of their

teachers better. It is difficult to evaluate the success of part 1A of my action plan because I only

tried it once. It may be possible that Merlin felt closer to his classmates because the activity

revealed something he has in common (pet ownership) with many of the other students, but it is

also very possible that Merlin volunteered to show his dog because he loves Rocky and wanted

people to see how cute he is. Overall, I definitely think that the reactions of Merlin, the other

students, and my mentor teacher support an activity like Pet Day, but I cannot say definitively
whether it made a significant difference in Merlin’s feeling of belonging in the classroom

community.

The second part of my action plan involved having the students do more work and

discussions in random small groups. I wanted the groups to be random (1B) so that students

could work with different people each time and to avoid the exclusion that can occur when

students choose their own groups. The first time we tried small group work was for our

discussion of the first part of The Awakening. To prepare students for their final writing

assignment and to warm them up for a large group discussion, I had students complete an

activity in which they made memes based on an assigned -ism and The Awakening. Google

Meet assigned students randomly into four groups and the students worked in breakout rooms to

analyze my example memes and create their own. Merlin was in a group with four other

students that created a meme (Figure 1) connecting feminism with Edna’s relationships. Because

of the way breakout rooms work, I was not able to observe all of Merlin’s group’s discussion.

When I did join their room, the students were actively engaged in discussion, which many of the

other groups were not, but I did not witness Merlin participating. One significant limitation of

breakout rooms is that Merlin may have actively participated while I was with another group and

therefore did not get to hear what he had to

say. I know from the other silent rooms of

other groups that some students do not talk

to each other at all in breakout rooms

because there is no teacher with them.

After all the groups finished their memes,

the class rejoined the main meeting and Figure 1

shared their creations with the rest of the class. Each group selected one student to explain their

meme. Merlin was not that student for his group. While it is entirely possible that Merlin

participated when I was not in his breakout room to witness it, for this particular activity I did

not collect any evidence of increased participation from him.

 The next time we used breakout rooms, students came to class with a vague idea for their

final writing assignment and conferenced in groups to turn those ideas into strong, supportable

claims. At the beginning of class, students completed a Google form in which they wrote a few

of their ideas and any questions about the assignment. I put them in groups of four based on

shared interests and topics. It took me about five minutes to put students into breakout rooms,

during which time the students just sat and waited. As the teacher, non-random groups like these

felt burdensome and I would really only do it again if I had a strong reason to not do random

groups. Based on his check-in (Figure 2), Merlin was placed in a group of people with very

different topics but a similar understanding of the assignment. While most of the students had

very vague ideas that needed a lot of developing, Merlin and his group mates already had clear

ideas of what they wanted to write about. While I ended up spending most of my time working

with the groups who needed more help, I did notice a significant change in Merlin’s participation

Figure 2
during these writing conferences. Despite my limited time with his group, Merlin participated

more than once for the first time all year, not only sharing his idea for his paper, but also giving

his opinion about the other student’s ideas as well. While Merlin is typically one of the last

students to submit in-class work, he was the second student to submit his exit ticket (Figure 3). I
believe that Merlin’s apparent confidence in assignment coupled with the smaller group

environment led to his feeling more comfortable participating. There were significantly fewer

people listening to him, so it felt more like a conversation than a presentation.

As we continue to do small group work in the book club unit, I will get to further observe

whether Merlin participates more in this type of discussion structure. Merlin, who is in one of

the larger groups with four other students, is reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,

Figure 3

which is about a black woman whose cervical cells were unknowingly taken by doctors and used

in some of the largest advances in medicine in recent history. We have done one book club

meeting so far, in which Merlin participated several times, but always after his classmates

shared. His participation followed a pattern in which each of his group mates would comment

about something before he would be willing to share his thoughts on it. It is possible that the

small group environment doesn’t necessarily make him more comfortable sharing, but rather

makes him feel obligated to share more times. Fisher, Frey, and Hattie argue in The Distance

Learning Playbook that book clubs “linked to a common theme” (in our case, African American

language and stories) “promote reflective conversations in an online environment” (133). I am

hoping that as he continues to work with the same group members every day, Merlin will

continue participating multiple times in a class period and that he will begin offering his ideas

earlier in the conversation, particularly as my mentor teacher and I begin to relinquish control of

the discussion over to the students themselves.

 While the first two parts of my action plan addressed Merlin’s potential need to be

included more in the classroom community, the last two parts addressed a possible lack of

engagement in the material. Because of my limited control over the curriculum, I was not able to

do as much with these alternatives for action, but I was still able to try some different things in

order to hopefully increase Merlin’s engagement. My first idea was to add more multimodal

texts, which Merlin mentioned enjoying in his “About You Questionnaire.” I added the meme

activity to The Awakening unit to get students to represent their ideas in a new, more humorous

way. As I mentioned earlier, I did not witness any change in Merlin’s participation during this

activity, possibly because of the difficulty of administering multiple breakout rooms at once.

The only other multimodal text we have studied since I began this project is the documentary

American Tongues. From reading Merlin’s answers to the accompanying questions, I can tell

that Merlin watched the documentary closely. His answers were very specific, often including

quotations from the film (Figure 4). During discussion, Merlin participated more than once for

the first time in whole class discussion. He used examples from both the documentary and his

Figure 4
own life to support his opinions, talking about how the phrase “party store” is something most

people outside Michigan would not understand. Given his response to the film Saved!, which I

mentioned in my analysis of hypothesis 2, I feel confident in saying that videos and movies, if

not all multimodal texts, do increase his engagement and participation in class. Many of the

other students participated a lot more willingly as well, leading to one of the best discussions we

have had all semester. Multimodal texts like film follow the principles of UDL (Universal
Design for Learning), which states that presenting information in multiple mediums “can make

the information in text more comprehensible for any learner and accessible for some who would

find it completely inaccessible in text.” Including the film made it easier for students with

different learning needs and strengths to access the information about dialect, which led to

deeper learning by both Merlin and the rest of his classmates.

In my action plan, I also planned to address my concerns that Merlin was not able to

relate to the texts we were studying. I did my best with The Awakening unit, encouraging the

students to think of their mothers, aunts, older sisters, and other women in their lives when

reading, but I did not notice any change in participation or engagement from Merlin as a result of

this advice. I am hoping that the book club unit will be more relatable for Merlin since it centers

around African American stories and since his focus book has a wider range of character with

which one can relate. However, I cannot assume that just because both Merlin and the

protagonist of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks are both black means that they will have

similar experiences. I will need to observe more book club discussions before I can say whether

or not this unit is more relatable than the previous one. So far, however, Merlin has responded

well to our discussion of American Tongues, as I mentioned previously. The discussion required

students to reflect on their own dialects and languages, which meant that every student had to

make a connection between themselves and the people in the documentary. The students were

given twenty questions and were required to respond to ten of them, giving them the option to

write about the things that interested them the most. Merlin answered several of the questions

about language discrimination and code switching (Figure 5), potentially indicating that he can

relate to these things. As I mentioned earlier, Merlin participated more in our discussion of

American Tongues than he has in any other whole class discussion. Because this activity
involved both a multimodal text and more relatable content, I am not able to determine whether

Merlin’s increased participation is due to the film, the personal connection, or something else

entirely. I will continue to observe his engagement and participation for the rest of the book club

unit in order to hopefully collect more information.

Overall, I am pleased with Merlin’s progress in my focus class. I had hoped to see a

large increase in his participation, but I recognize that behaviors are not likely to change

overnight and that part of Merlin’s lack of participation is due to his shy personality. While I do

believe that my action plan, particularly the small group work, contributed to his increase in

Figure 5

sharing, it is also very likely that Merlin just needed a bit more time than the other students to get

used to the classroom community. I hope that I can continue to help Merlin feel like an

important part of our class, since “students need to feel safe enough to ask for help, but a safe

community is also essential if students are going to take academic risks” (Christenson, Teaching

with Joy and Justice, 15). Looking back at my hypotheses for explaining Merlin’s behavior, I

think that it is most likely that both of them are true to some extent. I have noticed Merlin

reacting to his classmates with more natural facial expressions, laughing, smiling, and nodding.

To me, this indicates that he is starting to feel more comfortable with his classmates. I have also

noticed Merlin writing more on his assignments for the book club unit, indicating that his

engagement is increasing. One potential explanation that I did not address in this project is that

Merlin lacks confidence in his abilities. After observing him over several weeks, I have

discovered that Merlin always asks for permission before participating, saying “Can I go?” any
time he wants to say something. A few of my other students do this as well, possibly due to

being drilled in hand raising their entire education. Online learning has eliminated a lot of hand

raising, so students have found other ways to determine speaking order. However, Merlin also

frequently says “but I don’t know” after sharing his ideas. I think that he may need more

positive encouragement in order to feel more confident that his ideas are valid. In the future, I

hope to help Merlin increase his authority over his voice and feel that his ideas are worth

contributing to class discussion.

At the end of the day, I don’t think there is ever one single reason that a student is not

participating or engaging in class, nor is there one single solution. Everything that happens in a

classroom and with a student is so complex and interconnected that it is nearly impossible to

definitively say that one change in pedagogy will solve everything. This project has given me

the skills to think more deeply about how every choice I make has an effect on students and to

feel more confident experimenting with my curriculum and my teaching in order to effectively

educate and support my students. Just as students are always changing, so too must the teacher

be always changing, always looking for something better or more effective. My teaching

philosophy and methods will always be evolving and developing in response to the needs of my

students, including Merlin.

 Works Cited

“Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2.” CAST, 2018,

udlguidelines.cast.org/representation/language-symbols/illustrate-multimedia.

Christensen, Linda. Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-imagining the Language Arts Classroom.

Rethinking Schools, 2009.

Fisher, Douglas et. Al. The Distance Learning Playbook: Teaching for Engagement & Impact in

Any Setting. Corwin, 2021.

Minor, Cornelius. We Got This: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us

to Be. Heinemann, 2019.

Tovani, Cris. Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?: Content Comprehension, Grades 6-12.

Stenhouse Publishers, 2004.