By: Alicia Briley

Throughout the research project, I’ve had many successes. I consider the ability to come up with artistic ideas and work together with my partner quite a success. I think my greatest achievement for this project would be gaining more confidence in my ideas and myself. In a way I feel I gained more confidence in my creativity, because I was able to be my true self. Sometimes that’s hard for me to do. I was able to think wide open and create something different for a project that I am proud of accomplishing. When doing research for this project, I realized that there is so much more to American literature than I ever thought. As prepping for this final project, I was able to positively grow in my learning, creativity and communicative skills. I agree with my project partner that when you are a teacher, you always need to take the lead and sometimes that can be challenging. My project partner and I have accomplished a lot throughout this research project. I am excited to see how the final product comes out. I discovered that sometimes you don’t always have to fit the mold of society and when being true to who you are is all that matters.

During this research, we also faced some challenges. I didn’t face any challenges working with my partner; it was only with my own ideas that I came across challenges. The challenges that occurred during this project were more personal. When discussing my ideas with my research partner, I was scared to share them because I felt my ideas wouldn’t be good enough. I am always scared to do group projects. I think it’s just a matter of working on gaining more confidence in myself. My research partner was very open to my ideas and I was able to be myself. I worked around my challenges by just taking it one day at a time.

Our final project teaching tool will be a podcast, where I will be focusing on musical and my partner will be doing natural intelligence. I strongly believe that by engaging these two intelligences, fourth- grade students will be more engaged and interested in the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe.

I have learned a ton throughout this research process and wouldn’t mind doing it over again. I was able to expand my knowledge on topics that I was familiar with, learned more information on the gothic and romantic periods and American literature. Also, I found Poe’s style of writing quite fascinating, as well as how he had an interesting life of joy and hardships. I believe our podcast will help students engage and have a better understanding of “The Raven” and its author. Over the course of this research project, I haven’t come across any frustrations. I can’t wait to see the result of my and my partners hard work.