5 Tools to Help Students Learn How to Learn Helping students learn how to learn: That’s what most educators strive for, and that’s the goal of inquiry learning. That skill transfers to other academic subject areas and even to the workplace where employers have consistently said that they want creative, innovative and adaptive thinkers. Inquiry learning is an integrated approach that includes kinds of learning: content, literacy, information literacy, learning how to learn, and social or collaborative skills. “We want students thinking about their thinking,” said Leslie Maniotes a teacher effectiveness coach in the Denver Public Schools and one of the authors of Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century. “When they are able to see where they came from and where they got to it is very powerful for them.” A good example is a long term research project. During the process, students will go through different stages of emotions. [RELATED READING: Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning]
Science Education on the Edge · Experimenting with student-centered science education “On-Task” is not a waypoint on the route to engagement SmartBlogs Can you recall a time when you were so engaged in learning that you became unaware of your surroundings, that each step of the process energized you to pursue your goal further, and the learning became its own reward? Recently, I was working with a gathering of administrators from my county, contemplating the puzzle of student engagement. Most of the small groups in the room organized their exploration around the premise that on-task behavior is a necessary but insufficient step toward engagement. It occurred to the team from my district, however, that perhaps we weren’t looking at a simple linear progression. Our district team had two insights as we created this diagram. First, there are students in our classrooms who are off task (not participating in activities we have assigned) but are nevertheless engaged in learning. Second, teachers favor the left side of the chart. Reflect again on the learning experience I asked you to think about at the start of this post. Gerald W.
Bridge in the Middle - Thoughts of a Middle School Principal Curious Homework: An Inquiry Project for Students and Parents Photo credit: iStockphoto International educator Scot Hoffman is a big believer in the power of curiosity to drive learning. After nearly two decades of teaching around the globe, he also realizes that school isn't always so hospitable to inquiring minds. I first met Hoffman a couple years ago during a visit to the American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India. Here are highlights of our recent conversations about The Curiosity Project. What was the inspiration for this idea? Scot Hoffman: In about my third year of teaching -- this was back in the 1990s -- there were a couple students I just wasn't reaching. Another inspiration was a set of questions that a former professor, Dr. What is curiosity? Those questions reminded me of the writers' workshop model. How do you encourage students to be more curious learners? Hoffman: A teaching partner and I started by interviewing curious people in front of our students. After a few of these interviews, we told students: Now it's your turn. It's Time!
TeacherTalk « @TeacherToolkit We all love to talk in the classroom! Students disagree; and so do Ofsted. TeacherTalk can often be the root-cause of poor behaviour and debilitating progress during a lesson. Here is where the problem lies: Firstly, do not tick boxes. This page has evolved as a result of my own leadership of whole-school Teaching and Learning and as a priority we identified during 2011/12. As I collate ideas and strategies, I will post them here for editing and will create a document to share on TES Resources. Strategies for reducing TeacherTalk You can leave a comment on my WallWisher Top Teacher-Talk strategies: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. @TeacherToolkit Like this: Like Loading...
The Challenges and Realities of Inquiry-Based Learning Inquiry Learning Teaching Strategies Getty By Thom Markham Teachers in a rural southeast Michigan high school were recently discussing the odd behavior of the senior class. It seems the 12th graders were acting more civilly toward the junior class in the hallways. The teachers’ explanation: Project-based learning. Here’s the back story. Stories like this are about to become more important to educators. This is a steep challenge because it forces education to cross a philosophic divide. Standardizing Valuable Skills To put a new system in place, a first key step is to disseminate and train every teacher on a clear set of performance standards to assess skills required for effective inquiry, such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. The challenge: Right now, a standards-based environment forces teachers to straddle the inquiry process. Assessing Collaborative Learning The iconic model of the individual scholar has been replaced by team-based inquiry. Related
Inquiry Learning Vs. Standardized Content: Can They Coexist? By Thom Markham As Common Core State Standards are incorporated from school to school across the country, educators are discussing their value. It may seem that educators are arguing over whether the CCSS will roll out as a substitute No Child Left Behind curriculum or as an innovative guide to encourage inquiry rather than rote learning. In reality, as time will prove, we’re arguing over whether content standards are still appropriate. Everyday there is less standardization of information, making it nearly impossible to decide what a tenth-grader should know. There is only one resolution to the debate. If you’re a teacher in tune with the needs of your students, you sense the disconnect between the curriculum and reality. So how can you, as a teacher, help move the dialogue forward? But PBL is the near-term solution. REDEFINE RIGOR. TEACH INQUIRY SKILLS. MAKE COHORTS AND TEAMS THE PRACTICE, NOT THE EXCEPTION. team learning. SEE THE BALANCE BETWEEN INQUIRY AND CONTENT AS A DYNAMIC.
Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning If kids can access information from sources other than school, and if school is no longer the only place where information lives, what, then happens to the role of this institution? “Our whole reason for showing up for school has changed, but infrastructure has stayed behind,” said Diana Laufenberg, who taught history at the progressive public school Science Leadership Academy for many years. Laufenberg provided some insight into how she guided students to find their own learning paths at school, and enumerated some of these ideas at SXSWEdu last week. 1. BE FLEXIBLE. Laufenberg recalled a group of tenacious students who continued to ask permission to focus their video project on the subject of drugs, despite her repeated objections. 2. Laufenberg’s answer: Get them curious enough in the subject to do research on their own. “Rather than saying, ‘We’re going to study immigration,’ I took them through a process where they become interested in it themselves,” she said. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Why Middle School? Seeing, wondering, theorizing, learning: Inquiry-based instruction with Kishia Moore There they go — Mitchell County teacher Kishia Moore and her class of seventeen first graders — up Gem Mountain not far from their school, Greenlee Primary, to pan for gemstones for use in their NC Standard Course of Study-mandated science unit on minerals. And here the kids come, back down the hill, dirty, damp, and hauling impossibly heavy — for the kids’ size, that is — loads of rocks that during the next five to six weeks, they will study, sort, measure, weigh, scratch, break if possible, discuss, compare, draw pictures of, polish in noisy rock tumblers, and, ultimately, fashion into items of jewelry. If Ms. Moore employed traditional teaching methods, her next tasks would be to explain the sorting and measuring processes and then direct her students through those processes. Ms. The definition Ms. The theory Ms. How, it may be legitimately asked, can traditional teaching methods be characterized as obstructing learning? Answers Ms. The method Ms. Next, Ms. Classroom activity Thinking maps
What is moe? | Mantle of the Expert.com A brief overview: The Mantle of the Expert is a dramatic-inquiry based approach to teaching and learning invented and developed by Professor Dorothy Heathcote at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1980’s. The big idea is that the class do all their curriculum work as if they are an imagined group of experts. They might be scientists in a laboratory or archaeologists excavating a tomb, or a rescue team at the scene of a disaster. They might be running a removal company, or a factory, or a shop, or a space station or a French resistance group. Because they behave ‘as if they are experts’, the children are working from a specific point of view as they explore their learning and this brings special responsibilities, language needs and social behaviours. Let us be clear: the children are not putting on a play or running a business.
Five Steps to Create a Progressive, Student-Centered Classroom By Mark Barnes A student-centered classroom is built on autonomy and the elimination of traditional teaching practices. The student-centered classroom operates on collaboration, project-based learning, technology integration, and plenty of conversation between students and teachers about learning. Here are five steps to building a remarkable student-centered classroom. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. If you teach in a student-centered classroom, how does it differ from traditional learning? Mark Barnes is a 20-year classroom teacher and creator of the Results Only Learning Environment (ROLE), a progressive, student-centered classroom that eliminates all traditional teaching methods, including grades.
Reading Comprehension and Considerate Text, Teaching Today, Glencoe Online Inquiry-Based Approaches to Learning Few things excite teachers more than when their students take over the role of grand inquisitor. When students begin formulating questions, risking answers, probing for relationships, we know they've entered the zone where learning occurs. Not surprisingly, few things excite students more than when they are actively engaged in learning so much so that they forget the clock. These experiences are the goal of inquiry-based learning, an active, student-centered, educational method whose roots go back to the educational philosopher John Dewey. The basis of the inquiry-based approach is to facilitate student-generated questions as the core part of the learning process. After students learn effective questioning techniques, they begin researching to pursue answers and will, consequently, make their own discoveries. What are the steps of inquiry-based learning? What makes inquiry-based education different? What are the advantages to inquiry-based learning?