27/2/11
Learning@School Conference
1. Setting a rich end task / problem for every inquiry, carefully including the most important key words. Tasks also need to be set in such a way that children get to practise the attitudes and skills that best meet the key competencies they are expected to cover.
Strategies:
- Plan a rich and varied Hook phase
- After Hook phase decide on area of interest and create rich task with authentic context/purpose
- Develop children's questions around rich task - this will be ongoing throughout unit, as they move through steps towards completion of the task
2. Use my blog as a tool for exposing children to our thinking tool box. I commit to explicitly teaching a range of thinking strategies, hopefully working towards children selecting their own thinking strategies.
Strategies:
- Create a Thinking Tool Box page on class blog
- Refer to it often - make it attractive, interactive as possible
- Use children's wonderings from classroom Wonder Wall as a spring board to teach internet search skills, validation, analysis skills, etc.
- Frequently use rich movie clips to generate wonderings, questions and arguments (part of oral language programme?) and to explicitly teach certain thinking tools.
3. I commit to focusing on teaching my students how to develop useful questions. I will NOT focus on closed vs open questions.
Strategies:
- Explicitly teach what a good question is (ie: One that gets you the information you are looking for)
- Explicitly teach / model how to refine questions until we get the information we need
- Use questioning matrix - create a matrix that suits our class
- Frequently ask children to evaluate their questions using the matrix
- Track children's progress on the Inquiry matrix. This means that I will have Thinking all year as the KC layer and Questioning as the skill layer all year.
