At IIS, the grade 2 class is embarking on a fantastic journey of student-led inquiry, powered by a Visible Thinking routine.
We are doing a Who We Are unit with the central idea, 'People can use strategies to improve relationships with others.' This had been done by previous teaching teams as a way to focus on behaving responsibly. It was done at the beginning of the year so that the ideas 'taught' during this unit could be referred to during the year.
I have never been a fan of this unit as I found it difficult to see how, or why, students could take ownership of the unit. I feel that previously the unit was teacher driven. However, I find myself in the position of working in the classroom with the grade 2 team to do this unit. Luckily I am surrounded by a team of intelligent and hard-working individuals who are keen to develop a student-led inquiry. During planning meetings we talked a lot about what where were going to do with the summative assessment. We talked about previous ideas, and came up with some new suggestions. Two teachers in the team have just been on an inquiry workshop and had spoken to others about this unit and others schools had used interviews as a summative assessment, so that was also on the cards. We kept talking about the fact that we still needed to keep an open mind about the summative assessment as we still didn't know what the students wanted to do.
Through unpacking the central idea, we realised that students could understand the words, but didn't really know what the unit was about. We did a provocation were we played games with the students, but part way through started shamelessly cheating. In previous years this provocation offended the more principally minded students and started discussions about the need to follow rules to promote social harmony. This year the more savvy students just took our cheating as a cue to cheat themselves, but we still had the same discussion. We also did a learning engagement where students drew pictures of some of the people they had relationships with and described some of the problems they had with those relationships and the solutions they had employed.
I wanted to use the visible thinking routine of ‘Think. Puzzle. Explore.’ early in the unit. It took longer than I expected, three sessions rather than the one that I had envisaged, but the results were well worth it. I am a big fan of visible thinking routines because I love the way they force learners to think in depth about issues. This routine especially focuses on investigating possible areas learners can explore about a topic, making it ideal for the tuning in part of the unit. We finally got to do it yesterday and as I said earlier, as students struggled to understand what the unit was about, they struggled with the first part of this exercise. It wasn’t until the ‘puzzle’ part of the activity that things came alive. Students puzzled over the possibility of using strategies to improve relationships with family or friends. After discussing their questions, students decided that they wanted to explore such things as, ‘What I can do to become a closer friend to my friend,” or “How can I get my brothers to care more for me,” from the youngest brother of three boys.
At this point the unit seemed to spread out easily in front of me. If we have the students follow the inquiry cycle, finding out, then students will investigate strategies for improving relationships. The most likely way to do this is to interview people, especially peers. After collecting information students then move to sorting out where students can decide on strategies they think might improve their relationships and what measurable outcomes they expect from their behaviour to see if they have improved their relationship. Going further would be where they practice the strategies they have decided upon and measure the outcomes. Making conclusions would be where they compare the results of their experiment with their expected outcomes. Taking action would be to continue doing the strategies if they worked, or decided on other strategies if their original strategies failed.
We can scaffold the process by giving students a copy of the inquiry cycle and talking as a group about how to do each stage, then dividing students into smaller groups to talk about the specifics of their situation. This also works well for integrating mathematics, especially data handling, and literacy, where we were planning to write a friendly letter and this could be incorporated easily into the process.
I am excited to see the process unfold and watch students engage in a unit they created.
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