Collecting and Analyzing Our Data

Happy almost Thanksgiving!! As we are all packing up and heading home for the holidays, we wanted to let you know that we have finalized how we are going to collect and analyze data about brain breaks and their effectiveness. Hopefully we can entertain at least a few fellow commuters who may need a bit of light reading on their long and (hopefully) traffic-free trips home.

We have five ways that we are going to collect data during the course of our action research project:

1. Primary Behavioral Observation Chart: We will have two of these charts each day. The first chart will be filled in during the lesson directly before that day's brain break and the second chart will be filled in during the lesson directly after the brain break.

2. General Attitude Survey: This survey will be administered at the beginning of the study, before any brain breaks have been administered, and at the end of the study, after the three weeks of brain breaks have been completed. The survey will ask students how they feel about brain breaks in general and how they feel about each of the three specific brain breaks. A snapshot of the survey is included below.

3. Weekly Specific Attitude Survey: This survey will be in the same format as the General Attitudes Survey but will be given to the students at the end of each week of brain breaks, asking their opinion on that specific week's brain break (yoga, dancing, and fitness).

4. Pre/Post Academic Assessment: Although unclear on the specifics for this assessment, we are going to give a pretest at the beginning of the week and a posttest at the end of the week on the specific material being covered over the five-day period. This will be a way to measure academic success, and allow us to see if there is a correlation between type of brain break and academic success.

5. Anecdotal Notes: The observer(s) will record anecdotal notes about student behavior during the lesson directly before and directly after each brain break.

We will let you know more as we talk to our mentor teachers and find out exactly when this will all take place. Have a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving!!

An Interesting Read For This Cold and Windy Day...

Hi guys! The other day I was looking up ideas for working with kids who have behavioral problems. I have seen a lot of physical and verbal aggression in the classroom recently and was searching for ways to lower the chances of these instances occurring. I found an article about using yoga to deal with different stressors both at school and at home, specifically focusing on kids who come from broken homes where support is lacking. The article states that "through yoga movements and conscious breathing, youth are learning to be still, to focus, and to relax and have greater self-control." The article says that yoga is providing an outlet for kids to express anger, anxiety, and stress. Although it focuses on entire yoga programs and not three-to-five-minute brain breaks, I think that we can use this information to make sure that the yoga that we do with our kids specifically focuses on moves that lead to relaxation. Hopefully kids that are wound up, angry, or stressed before a yoga brain break can find some sort of relaxation after a short yoga session. Fingers crossed!!

Read the article here!

Our Timeline

Thought all you brain breakers out there would be interested in the timeline of our research.

Because some of our team is switching classrooms in March, we have a limited amount of time to work with. We decided on the following setup and think it's pretty awesome:

Brain Break Implementation

We decided to have one week for each type of brain breaks, with two days of 3 minutes and two days of 5 minutes for each week. We also wanted to have a day of no brain breaks to test our questions against. 

 Let us know if you have any questions or comments!

And Voila…Our Methodology For Our Action Research Project!

Hey guys! Just wanted to share with you our finalized methodology for our action research project…we are all super excited to see things starting to come together and to show you our "map" of where we will go from here.

Again, here are our two research questions:

1. Does the type of brain break (yoga, dance, or fitness) elicit different academic and behavioral     performance results in first and second grade?

2. Is there a signifigant difference in student performance between a three or five minute brain break in the first and second grade classroom? 

We will all be conducting our research in our respective classrooms (two of us are in first grade in Baltimore City and two of us are in second grade in Howard County). Our classes have between 20 and 28 students, all of whom will be used.

Although we are not sure of exact dates at this moment, we estimate that the research itself will happen over three weeks, spending one week at a time on each of our three types of brain breaks (yoga, dance, and fitness). The research will be compiled between January and May of 2015.

Our independent variables are the type and length of the brain break. Our dependent variables are the students' behavior and their academic performance. To collect data, we envision using surveys that tell us how student's feel about each type of brain break. The surveys will measure attitudes and motivation before and after the brain breaks. In addition, we will use some sort of academic assessment---TBD---and observations.

Other than ourselves, our mentor teachers will help us collect and analyze data needed for this project. If necessary, some of us may use our PDS coordinators, school administrators, and grade team leaders if we decide that they would be helpful further on down the road.

We will keep you updated about new developments as they happen! We are excited to share this project with you all!! 

This is a very interesting article and take on the importance for physical movement in the classroom being aligned with the curriculum. 

According to Kristen Hess, the principal and founder of Hess Academy, movement in the classroom is an extension of student choice.

"As adults we have the option of movement available to us," she told me. "We fidget or doodle, we get up to stretch our legs, we walk to the back of the room, but we don't give this option to children."

The best learning environment, she said, has different options, not just a standard solution for all students. I could see her philosophy at work in a classroom where students worked, some sitting at tables, some stretched across the floor and some using their chairs as writing surfaces.

No Sitting Still: Movement in Schools

Program teaches girls to dance and do math and BOOSTS scores!

This was a really cool video I recently saw on CNN.  This teacher combines Kinesthetic movement through dance combined with teaching math skills.

"Sinha realized that not only did dance boost confidence, but that movement in general had been integral to her ability to learn.

That Eureka moment became the birth of SHINE, a tutoring program Sinha began while at MIT. It incorporates dance, movement and math in a new approach designed to boost girls' confidence and performance.

The basis for SHINE is the concept of "Kinesthetic learning," which essentially means moving your body in order to better retain information.

Interested middle school girls come to the program after school, and work with mentors on activities that put math concepts into action. They might, for example, hold hands to create a shape on a grid, then move to reflect the shape across an axis drawn on the floor. Playing games using corners and instructions helps show how probability works, and choreographed dance moves illustrate the principles behind trigonometry.

Later, they work out math problems on the board based on what they learned, and frequently finish with a break-out dance session just for fun. When I was there, they learned a routine to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off," then tweeted a video of the results to the singer."

CNN.com

I'm a Gummy Bear!

Just wanted to share a fun video that my students have been enjoying the past two weeks:

The kids love it. They think it's so funny and fun. It'll be interesting to see which brain break they prefer once we begin our study!

Anyone out there have any other fun videos they show their students? Any other Gummy Bear lovers out there?