Spiral of Inquiry T4

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. 

Spiral of Inquiry iExplore doc

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. 

Maths Experiment

My maths focus experiment was to try and guide and support a group of learners through strategy and knowledge workshops.   I chose to do this as they were often self conscious and lacked confidence in their abilities, always relying on using algorithms and they had very little knowledge of other ways to solve problems.  The strategies I used for this group were used with the habitat as a whole and have led to some significant changes in attitude and abilities within our habitat.  

Firstly, we decided to organise our strategy workshops as a series of steps that followed learning progressions.  Each fortnight we have one strategy to focus on and three workshops that work at different levels with different sorts of numbers.  Workshop 1 focuses on the stage 4/5 level of the strategy, workshop 2 is the stage 5/6 level of the strategy and workshop 3 is the stage 6/7 level of the strategy.  During each session the learners are put into the workshop that best suits their learning (determined by a pretest) and half way through the session they have the choice to continue practising their capability in that level of the strategy or move to a different workshop to build on it.  This has given our learns a great deal of ownership over their learning and has made them a lot more self motivated.  The learners who started at workshop 3 are given the opportunity to practise their capability by teaching someone else.  

The other thing we have done is add more materials into our workshops and knowledge sessions.  In all workshops materials have been available, demonstrated and encouraged to support the learners in building new knowledge.  We have stressed the importance of using materials even at stage 6 and 7 of the curriculum and have encouraged different ways of using materials.  

Thirdly, we have used a lot of mixed grouping for problem solving and encouraged learners to teach and learn off each other.  

I'm am super dooper excited about this new way of structuring our maths learning because I can see the buzz it's creating amongst our learners and how much confidence it's giving them.