2020 Teaching as Inquiry - Term 3

 

As a Manaiakalani Cluster School, we follow the Learn / Create / Share pedagogy

We know that

1. Digital Technologies that our students use Empower Creativity
2. Creativity Empowers Learning
3. Sharing Learning is a powerful way to get feedback and feedforward to improve learning and creativity

Background information Our students Learn, and Create DLOs that help them to consolidate their Learning and also help others to Learn from their creations. They share their learning with a world wide audience and receive feedback and feedforward to improve their learning and do better.

We know that Student Design for Learning Links to High Leverage Thinking Practices (From Naomi Rosendale's presentation)

My Hunch: At our school, the quality of Student Design for Learning is providing some opportunities for High Leverage Thinking Practices and promoting amplification and turbocharging of learning.

My Question: At our school, are teachers providing opportunities for students to create multi-modal DLOs that help amplify and turbocharge learning?

My learning and findings will be around 

• What is Student Design for Learning?
• Are the DLOs that our students are creating, one dimensional Artefacts or multi media DLOs with pedagogic (learning) potential?
• How could some DLO work improve literacy (and other outcomes) by increasing students’ awareness of designing learning for others?
• Are our teachers giving our student DLOs the nudge?
• Blog comments on class and individual blogs around the student DLOs - their quality and quantity

Sample: Senior Team Classes and Teachers

From Naomi Rosendale's School Leaders PLG presentation

Based on the learning from Naomi's research presentation, my inquiry will be around finding out about our students' Design for Learning that they are creating and to find out if they fit into the MAPIC framework which enhances the quality of the DLOs. Are our teachers enhancing their teaching through amplifying and turbocharging the learning opportunities? 

My new target group

The reason why I chose to work with the new target group is because the students in the new group are less confident participants or contributors in their class room. They are withdrawn, shy and hesitate to be part of dialogic discussions.

We started with a pep talk about being confident participants in class activities and being confident when they share their learning in small or large groups.

The reason I was going to take this group was discussed with the students for buy in to work with me.

The students saw sense in the plan and were enthusiastic participants in our first lesson.

My second round - Teaching as Inquiry

Term 3 started well. I am now going to take a group of girls from Room 10
to be my target group for my teaching as inquiry.  

The reason for taking girls from this room is for helping these girls get more
confident in class and be active participants and contributors to class discussions.
At the moment they are very shy and do not participate fully in class discussions
unless asked to.

My Teaching as Inquiry will be in Reading and Writing

I will be focussing on linking reading and writing to help these students read and
write better.

Reciprocal reading and crafting sentences in their regular writing as authors do
will be the focus.

My hunch:

By learning how writers write (through Reading) for readers to enjoy,
students will be able to identify what writers do and use, to make their writing
enjoyable for a wider audience. This may enable students to write in a better way.

My Inquiry question:

Will reading and writing links provide students the awareness of how to craft
sentences to improve their own writing as the authors do?

I am excited to start with the identified group of six girls. The book we will be
reading first is Music, Magic and Imagination by Jill Eggleton. We will read this book as it relates to the topic study we are doing this term.

Teaching as Inquiry using the Learn, Create and Share Model

At Glenbrae School we are a staff that always reflect on what we do 
in our role as teachers, and work on noticing and responding to our students' 
strengths and needs. We question ourselves if there is need to change how 
we are teaching and do something different to achieve better outcomes for our students. 
This is working for us.

Working with Mary Wootton (Facilitator - Writing PLD) has been invaluable. 
Thanks to Mary Wootton, Rebecca Jesson and Lenva Shearing for clarifying 
the Teaching as Inquiry Framework and making it a lot more comprehensive and 
easily adaptable.