The initial idea for my Action Research Project emerged from my exploration within the Inclusive Practices Unit. In that unit I created an artefact to assess Year 1 students’ sense of belonging with a view to helping them settle in sooner. Through research and feedback, I evolved the artefact to become: A workshop to co-create what belonging looks like as follows:

• Students work in groups discussing their cultural and personal backgrounds to explore a variety of emotions and states that contribute to belonging, such as mattering, safety, inclusion and respect.
• Students self-assess their belonging on a scale from 1-5. Those who feel they belong the least could hear what belonging feels like from those who self-score highly.
• The class co-creates a visual and verbal language, using images, colours and numbers to express what ‘belonging’ looks like for this cohort specifically.

I concluded the Reflective Report by saying:

“I could also work with students to co-create resources generated for and by them, whilst sitting with the uncertainty of what they might create. This process has helped me to reconsider my teaching practice; I can see the differences between being a leader in the classroom and allowing student feedback to dictate what we do. I can allow myself to facilitate as often as I dictate, which could potentially lead to more inclusive practices, benefitting students and improving attainment and retention.” The key part of this is how I could work with students to co-create interventions that would improve their experience.

When thinking about the practicalities of completing the research for ARP, I realised that I would have most contact with a Year 2 cohort at this time of year. Instead of working with Year 1 students on a project about belonging, I thought instead about what this particular Year 2 cohort might need. Having taught them in Year 1, I know that sometimes they can be quiet and disengaged in seminars. I thought maybe there was an opportunity to develop a tool for them to communicate the emotions they are experiencing and to tailor the teaching style to the overriding emotion in the room, for example if students were mostly tired, stressed, energised etc.

When conducting research on this topic, initially I didn’t find many articles that tackled this subject specifically. Instead, I found lots of research on how mood impacts learning. Exploration of mood is extensive and multiple findings have been proposed – some contradictory. Something interesting I found was that positive emotion does not always increase learning,

“if students are in a good mood and the learning topics are of less importance to them, the positive emotion might detach them from learning: It may motivate them to pay only a minimum of attention, to reduce learning effort or to choose tasks with an aspiration level that is much too high for them. Positive emotions, however, do not corrupt school learning if the relevance of the learning content is evident to school students.”

(Hascher, 2010)

Reading this kind of work made me realise that the teacher may not be capable of altering the style of teaching to suit the general mood given ‘mood’ and ‘emotion’ are such complex topics.

Hascher, T. (2010). Learning and Emotion: Perspectives for Theory and Research. European Educational Research Journal, 9(1), 13-28. https://doi.org/10.2304/eerj.2010.9.1.13