I've been stumped as to how to progress with my inquiry these past few weeks. My teaching has been consumed by whole class instruction. I've been trying to get students to work in small groups but is hasn't been easy. Now that we're back from winter break, I do notice students are maturing a bit so I can start phasing into centers. Small groups/centers would be an opportunity for me to teach my focal group (which even then I'm not really sure who I want to focus in on). My focus was to get more participation from children who don't speak/participate but many of my students have speech/pronunciation problems that makes it difficult to understand them. This in turn has caused a delay in me finalizing who my focal students are. My idea is to collect data by having my flip camera used in one of the small groups. What I need help with is determining the purpose of the activity/why a puppet would be used.
These are three students who I had initially thought would be my focal students: I interviewed these three students this past week and what I found after talking with them is that students don't give the puppets a voice. For the most part, the puppet play they do is silent (violent, but nonetheless silent). Erik said puppets don't have a voice because they're toys and you can only move them with your hand. Angel said that only boys and girls can talk, so they pretend the puppets talk when they're doing a puppet show but they don't really say anything. Liliana was the only one of the three that actually gave the puppet a voice, but it was very generic by saying that puppets say "hola".
When I interviewed the class back in November, many of them saw the puppets as something that only I used. I don't want puppets in my class to be seen only as a teacher tool but also something for them. I have a pig named Paolo that I use to get their attention but I want them to use puppets in other ways.
My indicators of success would be for students to use puppets as a tool to talk. That's where I get stuck and don't know how to move forward.
