Inquiry Learning in Room 9

Inquiry Learning provides my children with the stepping-stones for their future learning.  Although directed at my level it still provides many opportunities for children to incorporate their own thoughts and ideas.  They are learning how to use the inquiry model and the different stages involved.  This learning is built upon each year as they move through the school and progress until they become independent learners. 

 I have just introduced Solo Taxonomy to my class and we are still learning the different stages and where they are at.  As the children become more familiar with it I think it will be easy for them to access what stage they are at and where to next. 

Inquiry in Room5: Introducing SOLO Taxonomy

Assessing children using SOLO is proving to be a challenge.  Sharing an understanding of the stages, as regards questioning, with the children was interesting.  Most of the children are working at the pre or uni structural level.  Even the ones who were able to use a question starter were often not asking the question about the topic being covered but just asking a random question.  My goal will be to teach children how to ask questions that will help us to discover the answers to our inquiry.

I think it will be more straightforward assessing children's understanding against SOLO and have shared the criteria for this with the children.  At this early stage I realise I am providing the children with an introduction to the whole focus of SOLO being the assessment tool for our inquiry.  Hopefully, the symbols relating to SOLO will have some meaning for the children.

What about Han Solo? Nic's understanding about Solo

Here's how I understand Solo:

1. The Homer: Prestructual - Nice guy but misses the point.
   
2. The Bat: Unistructual - You have the bat but you don't have a ball or any other items to play the game.
3. The Wolverine: Multistructural - Knows about mutants, fights for mutant rights, but is not a mutant.
4. The Spider Web: Relational - Here's where it gets tricky and sticky, you need to pull things apart, put it in order, look at it closely, compare, contrast, explain and then put them back together again explaining causes, making analogies and relating it to your experience.
5. The King: Extended Abstract - The Mac-Daddy, El Capitan, Don Corleon, The Godfather - take what you have learnt and apply it to a different situation.  Make something, predict something, imagine and reflect.

There you go... it's a start. 

Trevor Bond by Nic

This guy was freakin' awesome and he really struck a chord with me. It's so weird how he was there about questioning but I ended up taking away so much about other things. Actually, I did take a bit of everything from him.

The 'pentagon of understanding' that encompasses all ways of knowing really stuck in my mind the most.  I related it back to my experience of travelling to Guatemala.

Here are the sides (I can't draw them)

1. Episodic/experience
2. Factual
3. Linguistic
4. Conceptual
5. Behavioural/skill

My partner is 1/2 Guatemalan and I guess that's where my story begins.  Her mum was born and raised there but left to have all of her children in New Zealand.  I had a distorted 'understanding' of Guatemala based on some facts, behaviours and concepts that I understood at the time.  

However, once travelling there in 2003, I was able to include some experience, linguistic and conceptual knowledge to my increasing fact and behaviour knowledge.

Finally by the end of a 5 month stay in 2005, my understanding of Guatemala was sound as I had developed and combined experience, factual information, Linguistic, Conceptual, and Behaviours and skills knowledge.

This was over about 6 years!  I guess good things take time.

There were so many other points Trevor brought up and it was a fantastic day!  I really enjoyed the sound of his voice; and it was obvious he knew what he was talking about.  

He is someone who I aspire to be.

Senior Syndicate Inquiry Term 2

Task base inquiry has worked really well for motivating children. The children are very excited about their tasks and have found it reasonably easy to ask questions.

Taking time to teach children how to use search engines and looking through books i.e. using key words etc has been valuable in improving efficiency when looking for information. Also being thorough about the planning process and explicit about what we are learning has helped to keep all children on task.

Teachers are really pleased with the way the new inquiry model works. The new consider stage has worked really well for children to know how to move forward into the next stage.

Some children are still struggling with inquiry. We don't think this is a reflection on the model as these children are experiencing difficulties in other areas of learning. We have discussed how we are meeting the needs of these students and the common consensus was that we continue to give them one on one time and specific tasks that they need to complete in a set time limit so that they don't have time to wonder and time waste. This strategy has worked for most.

Change of Blog focus

As part of our 2009 goals all teaching staff will be asked to contribute to this blog.  At a Syndicate level the focus will be on teachers reflections on ICT and Inquiry.

Learning At School 2009

Learning Everywhere Conference 09

3 lead teachers, facilitator and principal attended the LATS09 conference in Rotovegas.

Overall theme of conf.  was CONNECTIVISM.  We felt it was a great follow on from the Ulearn conference.  The ideas/breakouts/keynotes all continued to develop this thinking.

All Coley attendees went to a breakout with Trevor Bond on questioning which challenged our current question rubric.  The emphasis was not on moving through levels (like a ladder), but more identifying the  type of questions required to gather relevant information. (Sometimes asking closed  questions is totally relevant).  

Teachers model and reinforce poor questions...we need to  teach students to ask better questions.

The idea of task directed inquiry also struck a cord.  Trevor used an example of his family building a land yacht.  The team work, sifting information, problem solving, rich,  and real nature of the task was exciting!