I'm a little late the game, but I showed up just in time! Nicola Millward, an instructional coach at IPS Hilversum @Nicola_EduCoach, shared on Twitter about her team's literacy planning through Kath Murdoch's inquiry cycle. I love Kath's cycle, because it provides shared language for learners and teachers new to inquiry teaching. Check out they approached inquiry learning through the cycle. I'm eager to delve deeper into the process.
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by Lu Gerlach As we try to introduce inquiry into our classrooms, it can be overhwhelming. Where do I start? What tools will I need to make it happen? How can I break it down for my students, so they understand and can replicate the process on their own.? These questions are normal. To help you with this process, WeI have created short inquiry snacks videos found in our video library. They walk you through three of the engaging, challenging, relevant, and significant inquiry thinking strategies that are the closest to our hearts. If we were to start anywhere, it would be these 12 strategies. Each inquiry snacks video last 1-3 minutes long and goes over the process and things to consider when implementing. They are bite-size chunks of instruction to help you get started in your own inquiry journey. Before you take a snack break, you must remember that inquiry is about the process not a product to showcase in this school. We are trying to provide students tools where they can become independent thinkers who pose questions, test out wonderings, and make meaning of their learning. All of these steps need to be modeled, tried, and adapted to each student learning style before they can explore on their own. Now that's clear, let's take a snack break! Go to our VIDEOS section to find our Inquiry Snacks. Once you've implemented the inquiry thinking strategies, you will feel more comfortable with the process of inquiry. You will see students enjoying the learning and taking more ownership of the learning process. When you feel more confident, you will be able to take larger portions of inquiry into your practice by reading the work of Kath Murdoch, possibly implementing the inquiry proces, and/or providing opportunities for students to explore their own inquiries based on their wonderings. Just like preparing a large meal, inquiry takes certain ingredients (time, space, materials), follows a recipe plan (inquiry process), and needs times to cook and meld the flavors together. This requires some patience and a belief that your learners are capable of directing their own path towards understanding. Just like a satisfying meal, you will feel comforted and filled with the knowledge that meaningful learning happened, because you released some control of the process. It's up to you to decide...are you ready to take a bite or sit down for a feast?
by Lu Gerlach I've had the opportunity to learn from Kath Murdoch in Dubai and in Houston. She is a wealth of information and her book The Power of Inquiry is amazing. Be sure to watch Kath's video about what it means to be an inquiry teacher. by Lu Gerlach We are so excited to announce our FREE Five Day Inquiry Challenge between Aug 3-7 that is focused on developing inquiry-based learning. Teachers will be given different challenges each day to support their unit and lesson planning. Join the Five Day Inquiry Challenge Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1177890089215736/ If you prefer to learn on your own, you can listen to the podcast Confessions of a PYP Teacher for similar ideas at https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/podcast All of the printable materials can be found at https://thinkchat2020.weebly.com/resources.html We hope to see you! by Lu Gerlach Looking BackAs we are looking to assess student understanding, are we considering the entire journey and not just content objectives? Things to consider when looking back:
To authentically assess a child, we need to see the big picture of student ability. This is especially important with inquiry-based learning, since it tends to be more hands-on in nature. How do we assess inquiry? How do we find a balance between collecting data on a child and evidence of student growth. Do we know the difference? Assessing InquiryThe IB has defined assessment in the PYP as evidencing learning, which places less emphasis on summative assessment and more emphasis on formative assessment. This is opposite of most curriculum focuses where there is a greater focus on tests that collect data points. The IB came up with four dimensions of assessment, which includes: monitoring, documenting, measuring, and reporting on learning.. Let’s take a deeper look at each of them. How are you varying the assessments you administer to your students? The PYP places emphasis on evidencing learning (monitoring and documenting) over data collection (measuring and reporting). This is often in direct contrast to most government funded programs. How do we find a balance in a data-driven school? We can show evidence of inquiry on our bulletin boards (inside and outside our classrooms), refer to prior learning, have students reflect more on their learning, take photos of learning and display them with a caption, and use rubrics and checklists. This will provide some balance to all of the required testing that is beyond our control. Here are some questions to help further guide your thinking process. This podcast ends our series on inquiry basics. Inquiry is a continuously evolving process and I highly recommend you purchase The Power of Inquiry by Kath Murdoch. Her book outlines the entire spectrum of how to consider inquiry in your classroom. Unlike most books, you don’t have to read it straight through. Her chapters focus on unique considerations when planning and teaching inquiry. It’s a wonderful staff book club choice, because you can delve deep into one area of planning and apply it directly to your unit planner. Get that one area fixed, then move onto something else. Remember, this is not a race, but a journey of becoming better. If you are a more visual person we will be having a 5 DAY INQUIRY CHALLENGE to walk through our guides. Join our Facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1177890089215736/
See you in our next episode where we’ll begin to talk about agency and action and their connection to inquiry. Remember, hold on to that passion by Lu Gerlach Now that we are asking a variety of questions, what will we do with them? In inquiry, we want students to explore their questions, test them out, make connections, and pose new questions. It is a continuous cycle of making questions, answering them, and generating new ones. If students don’t have this opportunity to explore their wonderings, they miss important connections between content areas and becoming independent thinkers. Is that not the role of school to prepare students for their future where they’ll work in a team to tackle challenging questions? I remember when I began my PYP journey in a bilingual, interreligious, vegetarian school in Cologne, Germany, I was overwhelmed by the volume of PYP verbiage that everyone was speaking. It went over my head and I didn’t understand what people were talking about when they spoke of inquiry and concepts. The training I attended gave you way too much information and it was difficult to decipher where to start. This is why I wanted to focus this podcast on one thing at a time and scaffold the learning from beginning to end in one area. I hope you have found some useful tips along the way. If I were to begin learning about inquiry again, I’d start with the inquiry thinking strategies from podcast #2. These help students to engage, challenge, find relevance, and make significant connections to their learning while giving you the structure you need as you are trying it out for the first time. These strategies can help students to develop a sense of ownership of the learning experience, they can be used at any time during the unit, and they can be repeated routines that students can draw upon in their own work. When trying out inquiry for the first time, it can be unclear on where to start. Here are stages of inquiry that can be explored:
What could this possibly look like? Let’s take a deeper exploration of certain scenarios and try to match up the inquiry thinking strategies. You can use the inquiry thinking strategies in all the stages, but these are my recommendations based on the specific learning scenario. No matter where you begin, the goal is to move towards student-driven inquiry. This takes time, practice, and a strong sense of confidence before we can get there. As educators, we need to be confident with the process and outcome before we can release it to our students. Another consideration, you can go through the different stages of inquiry in a single unit or a school year. Take your time and don’t consider it a race compared to the class next to you. It’s about building capacity in your students, nothing more. If you are a more visual person we will be having a 5 DAY INQUIRY CHALLENGE to walk through our guides. Join our Facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1177890089215736/
See you in our next episode Remember, hold on to that passion Fired Up About InquiryNow that we’re fired up about teaching inquiry, it should come along easily, right? Yes and no. The main part is that you are being open-minded to inquiry. Yay! This is the first major hurdle, because you are embracing inquiry as your WHY. You’ve considered how to incorporate engaging, challenging, relevant, and significant into your learning and teaching and you’ve tweaked your lesson plans for your unit. Is this enough? No. One of the greatest things people misunderstand about inquiry is they think it’s hands-on or project-based learning. Just because a student plays with materials, does not guarantee they understand the objective and can apply it to a new situation. Just like grown ups, students need to be taught specific skills in order to master inquiry. One of the foundational skills of inquiry is asking good questions. Good questions lay the foundation for the inquiry process and must be explicitly taught. So where do we start?When I was teaching in Dubai in 2014, I had a PYP Coordinator who handed us a question stem grid. We had no reference to where it came from, but it piqued our interest. My teammate Nathan Sadler, (hey Nathan...congrats on your new principalship. You’re gonna be brilliant!) decided to take this question grid and color code it. After some time, I realized that the way he color-coded matched perfectly well with different types of questions posed by Dr H. Lynn Erickson in her work on concept-based curriculum and instruction. Recently, I found the original source to the question stem grid in Kath Murdoch’s book called The Power of Inquiry. The grid is called the Weiderhold’s (1991) Question Matrix. The main difference between the grid/matrix that I use, it doesn't have such finite labels to limit the thinking just color coding. This makes it much easier for students and teachers to use. Let’s go over the colors now. The types of questions we ask can trigger inquiry or not. What questions are you not asking, because of fear or insecurity? These are the questions you need to ask the most. Our students are exposed to countless bits of information each day. Our role is helping them to decipher the meaning of the information and use it in new situations. This cannot happen to the highest level if we don’t ask a variety of questions. Now, let’s apply this to your current unit of study, in the PYP we call this a unit of inquiry. Go to our website and download the free question grid (thinkchat2020.weebly.com). From the lens of your unit ideas and standards, try to fill out the question grid. In the beginning, you might think this is too much. I get it. I felt the same in the beginning. For me, it was the process of getting comfortable using the grid. Once I found some familiarity, I stopped pre-populating questions for the unit and used the question grid as a guide. When I created questions during a mini-lesson, I would ask students to help me, so they could replicate the process independently. If you are a more visual person we will be having a 5 DAY INQUIRY CHALLENGE to walk through our guides. Join our Facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1177890089215736/
See you in our next episode Remember, hold on to that passion by Lu Gerlach Planning begins with a road map of where you are going. This podcast focused on how to map out your inquiry by answering seven questions. We hope you found it useful and here is the supplemental guide for your reference.
by Lu Gerlach Think back to your school days. What is an experience and/or person whom you remember the most? Take a moment to pause this podcast and write it down. Ms. YoungMs. Young was my fourth grade teacher and reminded me of the classic Hollywood star, Loretta young. She always wore a bun at the top of her head, carried herself gracefully, and wore long flowing skirts to school every day. More importantly, she was the first teacher who saw me not as a student, but as a person with unique gifts. Our school boundaries changed, and I soon found myself going inside a school I didn’t know that didn’t know me. Brownies was a major part of my school life and the new girl scout troop didn’t have room for an Asian girl like me. I was painfully shy and like most introverts strived to remain invisible. Invisibility was not a choice in Ms. Young’s class. Instead of letting me hide my talents, I was challenged to showcase them proudly to the world. Ms. Young emulated the Golden Circle that we talked about in our first podcast. She had a clear vision of why she was a teacher and it wasn’t to get students to pass an end of year test. Her purpose was to get students to see their inner light and get them to share it through the Arts, writing, speaking, and so much more. She built relationships not just as my teacher, but rather, person to person. She shared her love of literature with all of us and we became writers. More importantly, she found our inner passion, so we could manifest our own Golden Circle experience. Inquiry takes IntentionWhat does Ms. Young have to do with inquiry? She embodied everything about inquiry in her class, which made introverts like me find a purpose. Last time, we explored the terms engaging, challenging, relevant, and significant. Ms. Young used these terms to guide her teaching. She would often pose interesting questions to hook or engage our thinking. Then, she would challenge us by giving us problems to solve. She would ask us to respond by making relevant connections to our everyday lives. After we understood these concepts, she would invite us to find similar situations happening around the world to establish significance. I remember these things about Ms. Young, because she was an inquiry-driven teacher. I don’t attach the memory of her to worksheet packets, instead of our relationship and her passion for learning.. Inquiry is a different mindset about learning and teaching. Yes, Children have to learn facts, but how they learn them is largely up to you as a teacher. So, if you want to transition between a traditional teacher to an inquiry-driven one, how do you do it? You take a few simple steps to make a difference. One possible way is looking at your lesson planning. What is driving your purpose? If it’s standards, we need to change that to student interests and ideas. This can take some practice in transitioning, but it’s well worth it. Let’s look at some questions you can answer that will help to make your units more inquiry-based. Regardless of your school setting, we all have choices in HOW we teach. We are only mandated in WHAT we teach.
Something to Consider...If a child learns specific skills that help them to analyze problems and present alternative solutions, they will more than likely outperform those students who were taught to pass the test. You just need to trust the process. If you are a more visual person we will be having a 5 DAY INQUIRY CHALLENGE to walk through our guides. Join our Facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1177890089215736/
See you in our next episode Remember, hold on to that passion by Lu Gerlach In our last episode, we spoke about how to find our focus as teachers, especially when we encounter uncertain times. One of the things that centers me is the Golden CIrcle by Simon Sinek. As we look towards making our WHY happen in our teaching, what are some practical things we can implement now to see a difference? One of the best tools I created while still in the classroom revolves around the terms: engaging, challenging, relevant, and significant. The PYP refers to these terms when thinking about inquiry and developing inquiry-based lessons. Like most teachers, I thought of them as isolated terms until one day my students asked to assess my lessons. At the time, I thought this was a bit cheeky for my students to ask to assess my brilliance, but these terms came to my mind instantly. Here is a brief definition: EngagingTo engage is more than having fun, it awakens the mind to think and connect ChallengingTo challenge is confronting misconceptions and stretching ideas to a place of discomfort RelevantTo find relevance is reflecting on prior and current experiences and delving into their implications SignificantTo find significance is bridging issues from our local experience and finding the commonality of the human experience around the world I made a list of these terms on a piece of construction paper. After a set of lessons, I would ask my students to assess our learning through these lenses. I discovered that my students were able to articulate ways that our lessons met the criteria. If we had missed an area, they would brainstorm ways to do it in the future. This sparked an internal discussion within myself on how I could use these ideas to guide my lesson planning. Look at the diagram below to see how this improved my planning. As you can see, when you plan from using these four lenses, it greatly opens up greater possibilities for student learning and helps to provide a broader focus. Students are able to engage in deeper thinking about energy, rather than simple investigations and foldables about types of energy.
See you in our next episode Remember, hold on to that passion! by Lu Gerlach If you followed our blog post and want to a more scaffolded option, we've created a poster and two different reflection sheets for yourself and your students. Let's make the Golden Circle part of our goal setting and reflection practice.
by Lu Gerlach Do you know what your purpose is? Have you thought about it? As a new teacher, my purpose was to save the world one child at a time. As a child of an educator, I knew that a solid education was the only way to get out of poverty and make it in the world. I wanted to be part of the cog that led towards change, which is why I began in special education. About five years into teaching, I thought I had it figured out and my purpose was to share my brilliance with the world. Then, I began the PYP Teaching with a German partner in an bilingual, interreligious, vegetarian school. During this time, I realized that I didn’t know as nearly as much as I thought I did. The PYP made me realize that what I thought was the correct path towards teaching children was actually creating literate illiterates (coined by Kylene Beers). I became a first year teacher all over again. After seven years in the PYP, I developed a firm understanding of the philosophy of the program (which we’ll unravel in subsequent episodes) and I felt like I had it together. I was one of the favorite teachers and I loved what I was doing. My purpose was to share my passion and love for learning with my students and vice versa After 11 years of teaching, I returned back to the United States and became a first year teacher all over again because I had to navigate between what I knew to be right and standardized testing. It was so traumatic that I wondered why I was a teacher and how long I could remain in the profession. All of these experiences continuously made me re-evaluate my purpose. For the longest time, I couldn’t grasp my purpose until I watched Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk, How Great Leaders Inspire Action. In this video, he discusses the common traits of leaders who have been successful throughout time. They all had one thing in common, they began with the WHY. This was a game changer in my thought process, because I finally had a framework that aligned with my thinking. I quickly changed this to apply to my role as an educator
WHY - why did you become a teacher? HOW - how are you showing this passion every day? WHAT - what evidence do you have to show your passion? When I was able to answer these questions honestly, it helped me to get back on track to my original purpose in becoming an educator. I hope it will help you too. See you in our next episode and remember to hold on to that passion! |
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