Check out the feedback Caroline got on her Thesis first draft. Yeah...that's my wife!"Caroline's inquiry is excellent. It is critically self-reflective, well organized, clearly written and presents best practices of teaching and learning. She paints a clear and powerful picture of her problem and her desires to address the difficult obstacles she faces teaching in the Newcomers Center. Her goal to differentiate content between grade levels in such a transient classroom is appropriate and socially just. The literature review of sociocultural theories provides a strong framework to understand the students, their social context and different pedagogical strategies. She writes a terrific summary of Vygotsky, Moll, Rogoff, Krashen and Cummins and connects their ideas to her students and her goals of this inquiry project. Caroline's methodology section is thorough and exhaustive as she describes her intervention with plenty of detail for anyone else to replicate. The analysis is deeply thoughtful. She triangulates data from her ethnographic notes, student reflections, LAA test scores, and focus group feedback. In the spirit of action research it was excellent to read how she adapted her intervention to best meet the needs of her students through changing the LAA testing method into a group activity that proved to more pedagogically sound. It is impressive to see Caroline's critical self-reflections about the limitations of her own teaching practices that were increasing student dependency and her discovery of ways to empower students to become more independent through teaching them collaborative strategies to work together and assigning them roles and responsibilities."
