This term for our spiral of inquiry we have been looking at how to motivate our learners during iExperience, including provocations and team teaching strategies. Our original wonder was...
We wonder if using an open ended provocation questions and planning an iExperience collaboratively with different co-teaching strategies will improve learner engagement.
We had struggled with provocations that grabbed the attention of our learners and wanted to experiment with open ended questions and build it into our iExperience learning time. We had also struggled with feeling like our learners weren't as engaged in iExperience workshops as we would have liked them to be. So we refined what we wanted to explore...
How to create open ended questions that provide plenty of scope for learner choice and how to manage this in an organised but flexible way. Be open to, and experiment with, different co-teaching strategies.
I felt that this experiment went really well. The learner voice that we gathered at the very start was really interesting. Many of the learners felt that they didn't get enough choice and wanted to do more hands on, active stuff like art and P.E. The market day iExperience has turned out to be something that ticks many the boxes of what they wanted, they've been able to choose their groups and choose what they create, it's been creative, they've been able to collaborate. I think this project has been super successful!
I have really enjoyed this experiment. I found it really confronting to start with because we had a starting point but no other planning however I quickly became comfortable with where we were headed and have enjoyed the process.
What I learned from this inquiry
* Kids are more invested in something when they have had a large part in creating it. They do still need guidance though as they don't know what they don't know.
* Even less able, or ELLs, can participate in taking responsibility for learning in a collective way when they have the support of others.
* Mixed groups work really well.
* I think supportive teaching and team teaching work really well, I don't really think parallel teaching is a worthwhile method based on what we have done in our habitat this year.
