Additional Thoughts
Action research is an inquiry process that involves teachers in professional learning around shared, real-life problems (Risko & Vogt, 2016). While it may sound simply like a personalized form of professional development, action research actually fosters analytical thinking around classroom dilemmas, which in turn leads teachers to transform their practices as they learn (Risko & Vogot, 2016). The original intent of this action research project was to extoll the benefits of book talks on student engagement and literacy achievement. However, throughout the action research process, and especially as the connection between engagement and achievement became blindingly clear (Brozo, Shiel, & Topping, 2008; Guthrie & Wigfield,
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First, results indicated that strategies concerning student choice, discourse, and collaboration had a positive impact on student engagement across independent reading, collaborative group work, and written responses to text. Specifically, in the six weeks from pre- to posttesting, a heightened number of students were able to maintain engagement throughout the duration of independent reading and written responses to texts, as evidenced by an increase of six percentage points and four percentage points, respectively. Providing students with AT sentence stems and discussion norms for their group tasks was also extremely empowering, causing an increase of 12 percentage points from pre- to posttesting, as well as lengthier stamina for group work. Pretesting data during collaborative tasks revealed that engagement quickly began to decrease sometime after 15 minutes of group work. However, after instruction in AT sentence stems and the introduction of a variety of new talk formats for students, 100% of the students maintained engagement for at least four out of five data collection points. Moreover, during an informal observation, the school’s principal observed and provided feedback around high levels of student engagement, heavy-lifting, and higher-level thinking during a fishbowl activity and book club group discussions. This confirmed the visibile positive impact that collaborative discourse had on student