A Wonderful Week
This week we continued with large and small group inquiry sessions. The small groups worked well when inquiring on individual wonders. I found it kept the excitement and motivation higher for students with increasing the active participation. I also worked towards completing my UbD inquiry unit for the final summary.
My students participated in the two lessons to help scaffold their understanding of how to ask a good question. The first lesson using senses, the students were required to describe items in an attempt to deduce their identity. The act of guessing encouraged them to use more descriptive and comparative wording in order to refine their ideas of what it could be. This was an interesting process. The students instantly wanted to guess what the item could be. I began as whole class modelling the process of how to ask questions to deduce, and how to make a question more impactful. For example, is it long became, is it as long as a crayon or a paper clip? I modelled my thinking out-loud, explaining how I was creating an image in my mind of what I was hearing with things I already knew. Once I heard the students forming better questions, I broke them into small groups to play the game. I was really impressed with how they caught on to figure out what was in the bag. It was also nice to see how much fun they had learning new skills. The second inquiry lesson was with popcorn. We began with a MindUP session to help us feel more focused and mindful. In that state, I modelled how to mindfully experience popcorn using my 5 senses. What does it smell/look/taste/sound/feel like? What words can we use other than popcorn? The process of using a variety of adjectives to describe popcorn was a challenge at first. After modeling, I broke the students into pairs. They took turns eating a piece and describing it to their partner. I was really surprised by some of their answers. Lastly, I have been spending time every day to slowly build my PLN adding new people to follow on Twitter and looking for interesting google communities to join. Below is a slideshow that I created with PhotoPeach which I found on CogDogRoo. I found PhotoPeach simple, intuitive and fun to use. I have shown photos to provide a porthole into what inquiry looked like in our class this week.
Inquiry the K-1 Way on PhotoPeach
Week Four - Expanding on Understanding Inquiry
Video References
John Hattie, in his video on Inquiry-Based learning Kath Murdoch’s video, The Power of uuum. Here's the tweet from the teacher in my school. He is our innovation and inquiry teacher, so we spend a lot of time discussing both. I also found a few more interesting people to follow on Twitter though this process.
This is the tweet I sent out on Twitter. Unfortunately I did not have any responses. I learned that it is imperative to spend time building your PLN if you want to be able to get responses back!
This is the response I received by from Kath Murdoch. I didn't know if she would actually respond when I emailed but was really pleased she did. Her Ted talk, series of videos on inquiry and books are fantastic. I look forward to putting her ideas into action.
The response back from the lead inquiry teacher was not overly helpful. She felt I would be better to contact some of the other K teachers from our KLG (kindergarten learning group.) I have actually already done that with not a lot of success.
I did really enjoy working with the literacy specialist from my school. We looked at the new curriculum and experimented with how to form essential inquiry questions based on the big ideas. I will talk more about that in my next post. I am excited to get to work on my mini inquiry lessons next week. Week Three – Show me the Wonder This week I was able to activate my plan. I came up with a simple lesson to introduce and inspire questioning. I created a wonder centre with post-its for curious students to write down questions during the day and when we are doing inquiry studies Guidelines did have to be put in place to stop students disrupting group lesson times, and to encourage students to use inventive spelling instead of asking adults. Making the centre portable proved to be a great idea, as I could move it to the carpet and around the room making it more accessible. For the initial lesson, I introduced the Wonder centre and explained what the various words meant on the board. A few students had wonders without being prompted, but the rest, as I suspected, needed encouragement. In preparation, I had collected a bin of books on all types of insects and animals. I asked the kids to take time looking at the books and talking with a friend about what was interesting and what they wondered about. Most of the students were really excited to do this. Instead of explaining to the students what we were going to do with the wonders, I modeled the process with one question later that day. Below is a story I created using story board that is written from the child’s perspective of how we used our Wonder board on the first day. Just to note, I did end up paying $3.35 for the digital book. The site does indicate that their is a feature for teachers to set up classes and use free embed codes to share student work. The students were quite excited by the way they had figured out the answer to their problem. I pointed out how many students had different answers and they were all correct – just another piece of our puzzle. In class we went over using prior knowledge in more detail listing what we already knew about frogs and how we knew it. I also demonstrated how if we think we know the answer to someone’s question we can put a sticky note with our answer on top of the question. I can see how working through problems this way will be time consuming. Thankfully it is aligned with our new curriculum, celebrating understanding the process of problem solving and critical thinking instead of memorizing a bunch of facts about frogs.
As I reflected on the week, I discovered that inquiry teaching is a skill to be learned and practiced. I very quickly wanted to answer questions instead of answering back with guiding questions. I think the students got a lot out of the process and it felt more rewarding as a teacher to guide instead of preach. I could also evaluate their thinking and learning more easily because I could see the method they were using. The trick is, to get kids to figure out new questions to help guide them to their own answers. I’m looking forward to next week with some specific inquiry lessons to help the students develop an inquiry vocabulary. Week 2 Inquiry Learning Project This week was filled with an abundance of research, learning and deciding where to go with my topic. Looking back at my critical challenge question, I decided the topic required a bigger picture to execute in the classroom. I expanded the topic and branched out into defining and researching inquiry, guidance on how to ask essential questions, looking at searching, gathering and organizing material, platforms for presenting work, and finding lessons and resources to support inquiry learning. I decided to make a google doc to start gathering and sorting materials.
After sifting through many articles and explanations of inquiry learning, I realize that there are many ideas of what it is and how it should look in the classroom. I have decided to use a definition found in the article, Inquiry-Based Learning: Developing Student-Driven Questions. It states, “Inquiry-based learning, rather than presenting a set of facts, uses student inquiries, questions, interests, and curiosities to drive learning. This level of student involvement makes the learning more relevant, encouraging students to develop their own agency and critical thinking skills.” The article also does an excellent job at describing the benefits such as discovering the cycle of learning, asking questions that create new questions, and self-motivation to find answers which keeps them actively thinking and problem solving. The next important branch is essential questions (EQ). Again I have found many opinions and definitions, but my favorite is from, The EQ Guidebook. The book defines a good essential question as creating a spark for learning, is based on using critical thinking processes, uses real world problems, and inspires unbounded wonder. Creating an EQ is foundational to effective inquiry. To develop and model my own EQ’s, I will use the reflection questions provided by the EQ Guidebook. “Has the question: 1. Caused contemplation or any serious inquiry? 2. Inspired other questions and ideas or meaningful discussion? 3. Motivated the learner to think about creating something to solve a problem or meet a challenge? 4. Really taught us anything?” What everyone seems to agree on, is that to encourage curiosity and wonder, a good place to start is determining what we already know about the topic and building from there. Hence the KWL chart. I have always been a bit opposed to the charts because I have never seen them used effectively. Now I know, it’s because the students weren’t interested in the topic. The whole point of inquiry is to use what the kids are interested in. In theory, once you have interest you have engagement and commitment. In teaching, part of using inquiry requires, flexibility and adaptability to take advantage of teachable moments. Another aspect is allowing student to be in the driver’s seat with their own learning. This shift in teaching style where student learning can go anywhere, necessitates the search for answers from multiple and varied sources. This requirement supports the use of OER’s more successfully than a standard textbook which is limited in content and sometimes outdated. How all of this translates to my K-1 class will be slightly modified. My plan for this week is to sift through my current collected data and come up with some simple lessons to begin the process of EQ’s with the hope of inspiring curiosity. I would like to create a wonder centre to take advantage of the children’s curiosity in the moment, instead of when time is more appropriate. I will continue to add to my resource list and build upon my ideas to work towards my end goal of creating a unit of inquiry. Critical Challenge Question: How can I teach students how to ask essential questions and use inquiry to build the skills and abilities needed for critical thinking and problem solving? An Inquiring into Effective Inquiry How did I come up with this idea? This past January our class attempted a polar bear inquiry unit. Getting students to think beyond the most simple “why” questions into deeper thinking such as making connections, analyzing and synthesizing information was challenging. Below is an example of what we did. What became most apparent was that the students did not know how to ask essential quality questions. They did not understand how to use observation to guide their questions and seemed unmotivated to work together to find a solution to our class problem.
Where am I right now? A few weeks ago, some my students came rushing into the classroom and over to the pots of sprouting seeds we had planted . At that time, we were supposed to be quietly reading so I ushered the students over to get books. Something felt wrong with that action. Later that day when we did looked at our seeds, I once again attempted to get the students to make observations and ask questions based on those observations. It was like pulling teeth - even with modelling. Reflecting on the day, what I really felt was that I had a missed out on a teachable moment of curiosity and wonderment. If I had rescheduled the lesson right at the moment of excitement, I considered that it might have led to more active questioning and inquiry. It was then I began to think seriously about researching into how to develop my students' skills and abilities to explore and find answers. The following will be used as a guide for my critical challenge question. How do I most effectively teach the children about essential questioning? How do I best model inquiry skills? Is there is a better way to practice and ask questions to get students thinking? What types of activities best promote wonderment and curiosity? The process and final goal? To begin, I did an initial search to see if I could find enough open education resources to support the research and learning and was happy to find a variety of materials to complete the project. With the development of BC’s new curriculum, we as teachers are expected to look at our units in the light of inquiry. I am looking forward to developing a comprehensive list of resources to pull from for each subject area. My task for this next week will be to look through the research and come up with ideas on how to best implement my plan. My goal in the end is to come up with a primary cross-curricular inquiry unit that will help develop the foundational skills necessary to support using inquiry, critical thinking and problem solving required for student success in the future grades and beyond. |
AuthorK-7 Coordinator in SD68. Archives
January 2017
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