Final Draft

Final Draft is now posted on GoogleDocs. Thanks!

Weekly Post/Revised Abstract from before

As this quarter comes to an end, I have found myself placing my final touches on my paper. As of right now, I'm still tweaking and changing my arrangement and conclusion. I feel that my paper is becoming rather cohesive- something that I was worried about when first putting my blocks together. My paper has easily transitioned through the history of reform, the politics of reform, discourse communities opinions and finally, the new student-teacher relationship that has been brought about by the reform. My paper discusses how the Urban School Reform is the leading factor that is changing the way in which school systems are teaching education today. Though it is still seen as a controversial topic, the reform's "process" of renovations are bringing about various slow changes to school districts nationwide. Overall, my paper touches on what reform is, giving the reader a broad idea of how it is affecting the American Education System today.

I plan to review my paper a few more times and have the final copy ready by this Tuesday

Assignment for tomorrow

 Kyla Boertlein

Advanced Comp

By reading various blocks and analysis, one can see that my paper is over the Urban School Reform.  This paper is solely a researched-based work; explaining what the reform is, how discourse communities view the reform, how the student-teacher relationship is changing among the reform, as well as how successful the reform has been over the past decade. This paper’s intention is to give it’s readers a concrete basis to know an overall meaning of urban school reform.

Though I have no located an exact organization to my paper yet, I have started to play with the order of which I want my piece to go. It is as follows:

1.       Intro

2.       What is Urban School Reform?

a.       Definition

b.      History

c.       Where it stands today

3.       What discourse communities are are saying about the reform

a.       Teachers

b.      Students

c.       Community Members

d.      Policitics

4.       How the Urban School reform is affecting classrooms

a.       The Change in direction of teacher student relationships

5.       Where the reform stands today

a.       The success of the reform over the past 10 years

b.      Where the reform is going

6.       Closure

Though I have not had a clear defintion of what my introduction paragraph is going to go, I plan on incorporating some of the items below:

Attention Getter: A statistic involving tax payers in America. How much of the tax payer’s money is going to Urban School Reforms and Levees.

Thesis:  Howing the Urban School Reform is ever-changing, leaving it as a highly important issue among anyone who has a child, or who is a taxpayer within a local school district. It will argue how the Urban School reform has had a mostly “Positive” impact on education.

Feedback

By reviewing my blocks and feeback, I have found that though the beginning portion of my work started off strong, by the end of my second block, many mistakes started to be made. These included many grammatical errors and somewhat some confusion regarding what the last section was to get across. Since I have limited access to my computer, I have made these corrections on my printed off hardcopy, but have not made changes to my online document yet. Likewise, my computer issues have prevented me from uploading my introduction onto the gmail account. Though I thought the virus on my hard drive had been fixed, it is still acting up. I took it to the tech building again yesterday, so I hope to have it returned again by tomorrow to upload my documents.

Meta Reflection 2

Meta Reflection

Though this block has been a rather challenging one (in regards to my computer system failure that occurred last week,) I feel that these five pages turned out reasonably well under the circumstances. I feel that this block contains adequate information, but yet, I am missing a field conversation. I did much of the research that was discussed in our meeting, but I could only find bits and pieces of information late 1800’s and early 1900’s school reform. The most useful article was the one that we found in our conference written by Berrol. Overall, it seems that in regards to the history of school reform, most sources are saying about the same thing- citing the major events that have happened. I feel that though I have good information, putting this information together to create a meaningful paper will be the biggest task.

For my next block, I plan on writing about how various discourse communities are viewing the reform. These will include students, teachers, parents, and members of public school and urban communities. I feel that from this block, I might gain a better sense of a field conversation; thus, bringing may differentiating sides to my paper.

:(

As of 830 tonight, my computer had received a virus, crashed and DELETED everything on my hard-drive. Including 5 years of various works, information... and my 2nd finished block of my paper (Since I was using Microsoft Office). As I sit here trying to re-write my paper, I'm having a hard time remembering the exact field conversation that I had embarked on (probably since it's almost 1 am and I'm still frantic about all of my lost work/information). It seems that for this block, I am just now going to focus on re-writing all of my information and facts, the worry about connecting the pieces later. I plan on discussing this in class come Thursday!

Blog 4: Writing Process

    I have spent much of this week and weekend working on my second "block" of research focusing on "What is Urban School Reform." So far, I have found a surplus of information regarding the early 20th century reforms and the reforms that have started in the early 1980's throughout current day. It seems that many issues regarding where to start the reform have come about. Officials have focused on doing reform efforts nationwide, district wide, and throughout individual schools- doing one school at a time.  These three notions have been brought about in "Waves" something that I will be discussing in this block of the paper.
     My biggest challenge so far is to still create a "field conversation". Though there are many sources, often most of them are saying the same things throughout. Until I hit the discourse communities section of my paper, I do not feel that the school reform research at hand will have too many varying opinions. Most of the research is rather cut and dry- statistics, history and reports. As of right now I am focusing on the varying histories of school reform, comparing early demonstrations cited in the early 20th century to what communities are doing today for reform.

Meta Reflection

    Meta- Reflection

So far within the writing process, I think I have began to get a feel to where my paper is going. When I first started this block, I knew I wanted to do it on students and reform, however, I did not have a clear direction as to where to go next. As of now, I feel that I am going to research the various concerns involved in the Urban School Reform. Since this section has focused on student and teacher methods, I am going to focus my next 5 page blocks on these issues:

    Outline

1. What exactly is Urban School Reform

2. Student and teacher methods being used (As written in this block)

2. How successful is it using nationwide and statewide standards

3. Community opinions and outlooks involving the urban reform that is occuring in various areas (people who are for the reform and those who are against it)

I feel that with these main four blocks, I will be able to accurately inform the reader on what the Urban School reform is, how it’s affecting students and teachers, the success of it and also how various discourse communities feel about the schooling efforts.
    So far, I have been able to find a surplus of information regarding the reform. It seems to be that organizing the information has been the only difficult part. I have found Mendeley extremely useful when it comes to highlighting the articles as well as finding the information for MLA citation. I haven’t shared any of my documents yet, but I find the software useful for organizing and researching material. Overall, I feel as if I have a relatively clear direction as of where to go with my paper and research for the next few weeks. I look forward to conferences just to make sure I am doing so.

Week 2- Urban Reform

        This week, I have done more research in regards to the topic of urban reform. Though I have found more books helpful than articles, I have uploaded my first article to Mendeley (yay)! Considering I know nothing about technology, it has taken me a bit to get used to. I definitely like the editing options Mendeley provides, such as highlighting and leaving comments on the works that automatically saves them. For 750 words.com, I was not able to actually accumulate 750 words. Though I only made it to around 300, I definitely got a feel for how the website works. Usually, I'm pretty good at motivating myself, but it's good to see other ways in which motivate other people. 
       As for research, I think I'm going to do my first block of work on the affect urban reform is having on children.   I think it's important for readers to know the background of children in these schools. So far, I have been looking at four books checked out from Cincinnati Public that discuss this issue. Once I get the MLA formatted correctly, I'll post the sources up on here. Briefly, they are entitled, Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego, Listening to Urban Kids, It Takes a City, Listening to Kids: School Reform and Teachers They Want. I have also annotated the article, "Urban School Reform: Family Support and Achievement".
      I'm not quite sure if I want to focus the direction on my paper more towards the students how this is affecting their lives or on the politics of the issue. I feel that as I keep doing research, I will have a more guided direction for my paper. 

       

Starting to Research on Urban Reform

For my paper, I have begun to look at various resources regarding the topic of the urban reform throughout the country and especially here in Cincinnati,Ohio. So far, I have found a surplus of information regarding the school reform and the effects it is having on our society today. Most of the resources I have been looking at thus far are books, including  A Decade of Urban School Reform. It seems that through merely glancing at these topics, the issue of school reform has been an ongoing process. Other resources I have found thus far are as follows:

Ansell, Chris, Sarah Reckhow, and Andrew Kelly. "How to Reform a Reform Coalition: Outreach, Agenda Expansion, and Brokerage in Urban School Reform." Policy Studies Journal 37.4 (2009): 717-43. Academic Search Complete. Web. 04 Oct. 2011. <http://http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.libraries.uc.edu/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=15&sid=28ab8672-08ee-4f5d-bb65-6ebfaa5390b6%40sessionmgr11&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=44709269>.

Hess, Frederick M. Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education, 2005. Print.

Miron, Louis F., and John P. St. Edward. Reinterpreting Urban School Reform: Have Urban Schools Failed, or Has the Reform Movement Failed Urban Schools? Albany, NY: State New York Press, 2003. Print.

So far, these are the only items I have skimmed through at both the Cincinnati Public Library and on online data bases. My goal is to accumulate as many resources as possible and then begin to look at the direction that I would like my paper to go. This subject is something that I'm interested in, yet I do not know much about. My goal this weekend is to accumulate as many sources as possible and to start reading over them, hopefully getting an idea of where I would like the direction of my paper to go. I'm also trying to figure out Mendeley and this 750 words.com. It seems that my technological skills are limited, so I plan to keep looking further in the ways that technology can help expand my paper.