Effective teaching of writing in Manaiakalani

This morning I had the pleasure of listening to Rebecca Jesson speak at the Manaiakalani Hui 2014. She spoke about effective teaching of writing in Manaiakalani following six case study teachers.

This is what was evident with those case study teachers with high order thinking and cognitive engagement in their classrooms; student had plenty of opportunity to create to learn, discussions with students were rich, digital learning objects focus on synthesising and creating new concepts.

Have a look at the presentation to see more!

Effective Questioning - Trevor Bond

 

Effective questioning from EDtalks on Vimeo

Effective questioning -  27/09/2012

Trevor Bond, a consultant working within New Zealand schools, discusses one of his passions 'questioning'. He sees questioning as being central to thinking and learning. Trevor believes that we must go beyond just talking to our students about 'open' and 'closed' questions. He states that a good question is the one that gives you the answer.


Main points

• Thinking is a process of questioning
• Not teacher questioning, but learner questioning

Two types of thinking:

• Sub-conscious - when we are not aware
• Conscious - deliberately set out to make a decision, think about something so we can come to an end point

The whole thinking process, is asking and answering questions in our heads.

For example: Analysis - asking questions that compare and contrast. Decisions - asking ourselves questions, and finding answers.

• All revolves about asking and answering questions.
• Questions - prime intellectual tool - what aren’t we teaching kids to question better? - Neil Postman
• Questioning central to thinking

Thinking = Questioning


Internal and external questions:

• Internal - un-asked, cognitive, un-expressed
• External - expressed questions, to bring information, to fill in gaps, inform thinking.

Open and closed questions are not enough - we need to look at core skills that we use as questioners.

As adults we use them subconsciously - need to teach the kids the strategies and skills we use to ask and answer questions. Thinking/questioning process.

Facilitate and teach kids to become effective questioners.

So what is it that we do as effective questioners?

1.  We identify the need - how can you ask a relevant question when you don’t know what the need is?
2.  We identify the contextual vocabulary - how can you express the question if you don’t have the vocabulary? How can you understand the context if you don’t have vocabulary ?

Teach children, within a context or problem to:

• Identify the need
• Identify what they know,what they don’t know
• Along with contextual vocab to ask questions = effective questioner.

Frame a range of question types - fallacy “open are better than closed”. Nothing wrong with closed questions. A good question is the one that gets you the answer you need.


Stay away from who, what, when, where, why, which, how? Don’t leave kids out from asking good questions.


Teach children, within a context or problem to:

• Change and modify questions, until they find the way to answer their questions
• Embed keywords and questions
• Be persist until they find the answers

Create situations where the children need to ask questions to help them to solve the end point - then facilitate and support them.


If we really work on our children’s questioning ability, we are working at the foundation of thinking skills, foundation of reading comprehension skills, foundation at learning skills.


Go and help your kids to be effective questioners!

- Trevor Bond 2012

A picture is worth a thousand thoughts: inquiry with Bloom's taxonomy

This is a great example that show the different of levels of questioning/thinking when inquiring into a photograph.

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/media/articles/bloom0405-3/bloompix.html 

Term 3 Update

Busy, busy, busy in Class 10!

Term two just flew by! Now I am here at the start of term three trying to get into the right frame of mind with my inquiry journey so far.

In term one, I focussed on getting the students to understand and apply the NZ curriculum key competencies. We use them daily now in learning and social/behavioural situations. Focussing on the key competencies in term one helped us as a class to create classroom norms and expectations, and also helped the students to set goals for themselves in order to become better learners.

I also used the key competencies in my classroom to support small group expectations. So for example in maths or reading in our small groups I would integrate 'participating and contributing' and 'relating to others' in order to promote more dialogic/conversational norms. I started to use the 'Five Talk Moves' during maths so that students have the chance not only to share their ideas, but also listen to others ideas, and learn from them. The talk moves help students to have  safe yet engaging conversations/debates with peers, they promote re-voicing and clarifying, repeating, reasoning and adding on.

Last term, I was looking at Bloom's taxonomy and SOLO taxonomy and thinking about how to use them in my own practice. I used one release day to plan a unit that revolved around the 'evaluate' component of Blooms model. That activity was a success, as it challenged my students to assess two different perspectives and bring them together to make new connections.

Through the rest of the term, I continued to use Bloom's and SOLO and also introduced extended readings to students. It was recommended by Rebecca Jesson (our researcher that works closely for our school) to provide students with further readings related to the current learning context and also to make better use of the affordances of the technology we have available. For example during reading we start off with a journal story about sailing boats, then afterwards students look into related texts about other boats or something that relates to that context.

This term (term 3), I am going to continue with integrating Blooms and SOLO taxonomy in literacy and continue with providing my students the opportunity to access, analyse and respond to extended readings. I feel last term went so fast, that I did not give it  a good enough go!

There are also two other things I would like to look into this term and they are: encouraging kids to come up with their own inquiry questions related to our topic and also giving the students richer 'creating' opportunities in order to consolidate and reinforce new learning.

So in short here is what I am wanting to focus on this term:

Term 3 Action

1. Continue to promote and provide extended readings related to journal readings/class inquiry, based on Rebecca’s feedback. Provide opportunities to inquire into own learning.

2. Continue to use blooms thinking prompts in group discussion and follow up activities. (Focus on analyse, evaluate, synthesize/create).

3. Create to learn - reinforcing new learning through creation. Focussing on providing students with rich creation tasks to consolidate learning. (Rebecca Jesson 2014).

Research to support:
Biggs & Collis, 1982 - SOLO
Bloom's, 1956
Rebecca Jesson 2014     

Until next time...

This was my birthday surprise! 

Ka kite ano! :)

Creating With Movenote

Animating In Google Presentation

Follow these instructions to make your own animation using google presentation:


1. Draw a sequence of images on google presentation.

2. File > Publish to the web > Change size to 'small 480x299' > Tick the first check box 'Start slideshow as soon as the player loads'> Copy your embed code and paste in HTML on a new blog post. 

3. Now it is time to change the embed code or HTML code. Find the words 'delayms=3000'. Then change the number 3000 into a number between 200-800. I chose 400 :)

5. Publish and enjoy!

Using Bloom's and SOLO Taxonomy Reading

Last Friday, I used one of my MIT release days to collaborate with a fellow MIT teacher, Kent Somerville (check out his inquiry blog here). We decided to create a high order thinking reading unit around our inquiry focus - The Titanic.


A few days before I had received some feedback from Dorothy the head of the program, about my inquiry and my journey so far. Some of the main points were taken from Rebecca Jesson's research feedback and recommendations for our schools in the Manaikalani cluster:


- Provide student the opportunity to extend school journal text read, with online readings and further text.
- Give students rich 'creating' opportunities in order to strengthen learning.
- Stay away from low level 'digital worksheets' and give opportunities to learn from text and across texts to explain/reflect/show learning through creation.

This feedback provoked a lot of thinking and caused a total mind shift in my pedagogy. I had a eureka moment! I have been taught this way myself at school and had been taught how to teach this way… Good old photo copied worksheets from black lined masters and in worst cases digital worksheets.


I am also feeling quiet embarrassed that I didn't make this change in pedagogy sooner, I know that Blooms and SOLO have been around for yonks! It is now time to wake up and smell the roses and realise, that I  am getting closer to shifting my class, to one of high order thinking.


We chose to focus on 'evaluation' from Blooms levels of thinking. In the first session we got the students evaluate and assess the value and importance of 'thung chai' (basket boats) to the people of Vietnam. In the second session, students had to assess the value and importance of the Titanic to the people of the UK. Then finally in the last session, students had to assess why boats were important to different communities.


So there you have it, I am finally feeling like I am getting somewhere! Now to bring it into the classroom!