Kath Murdoch- Nurturing Agency Through Inquiry (Workshop for Learning Network)

Today our teaching staff attended a seminar by Kath Murdoch, whose book “The Power of Inquiry” has been the focus of our school’s professional development this year. We have been reading through the chapters during our staff meetings and endeavouring to incorporate the principles of her inquiry approach into our classroom practice.

No inquiry classroom works unless there is a strong sense of community within a classroom, to demonstrate a way to build this Kath had us write a question on a card and move around the room asking different people the question before swapping cards with them and continuing around the room.

How do we see our role? What is a teacher? How do we see the child as learner? Kath Discusses Julia Aitken’s research around how some teachers struggle to adapt to MLE classrooms and philosophy and others do not struggle. She believes it is down to the vision of the teacher, how they view their role as teacher, how they view the learner, how they view the curriculum and how they view learning itself. (Video of child running, explorefund.org, related to Reggio Emilia, child already capable) We need to view children as able to take risks and view ourselves as able to step back and let them explore.

Kath discussed the way she viewed her role when she first began teaching and compared it to how she views her role now, and mentioned that over time every teacher’s view will change. She asked “what would you call yourself if the word teacher was taken out?” One of the things that get in the way of good inquiry teaching is the teacher’s view of their role (video of teacher unveiling a pile of objects and asking the children to think what it might be).

How do I view the Curriculum? A good inquiry teacher must know the curriculum well so that they do not need to get bogged down in the details, instead being free to adapt learning experiences to fit an inquiry model while still fitting within the framework. Seeing the curriculum as friend not foe, being able to ‘let it go’

How do I view Learning? What “lies beneath” inquiry as a vehicle for learner agency? (photo of screen) How does learning take place? I feel that learning is often most effective when done through play and games, that learning often needs several approaches before it can be embedded, usually through a range of contexts and tailored to different learning styles.

“How does where you live impact how you live”. This question was used to explore science learning around time zones, seasons, night and day. She used the exmple of her friend texting her in the middle of the night (4am) saying that it was midnight. She asked a group of children how she could figure out where this friend could be.

Then generate quesitons about why there are different times in the world at the same time. Children come up with a theory about why there might be different time zones and see what they can find out through research. Children are aware that they are finding out more, and that it is ok if their theory is not correct. Children share their learning, recognise contradictions in each other’s theories, e.g. one girl thinking that night and day occur when the Earth turned vs a group of boys thinking the Sun and Moon swapped places in the sky.

Children brought something to the table from their own prior experience. In one example, children sorted out the responses of the class to 5 different questions, for instance what are three things we can do to stay healthy? A group of children had the task of organising that data into charts, written statements etc and share back to the class. “We noticed that a lot of people thought this…” Here is an opportunity for children to feed into the inquiry and steer it in a particular direction. This is an example of an activity/learning experience that I would like to try in my class.

Example of the Inquiry Diary: Grade 1 children looked at a rock with a stripe in the middle and wondered how the rock got the stripe. The teacher recorded all the theories of the individual children in a book, the ‘inquiry diary’. Students saw that all their ideas were valid and valued. The teacher write down the thinking “I think that the rock was scratched by a humpback whale…” Then a year 4 class was brought in and their contributions collected “I think that the rock is quartz because I have a collection of rocks at home…”

Giving learners responsibility: ONe teacher got children to write their goal for their learning on a whiteboard at the beginning of the lesson. Children wrote things like “I want to stay focussed on my work,” “I will check before I write,” ” I will be a collaborator” etc. During the lesson the teacher presses ‘pause’ on the session to ask the class to check back in with their original goals and comment on their progress.

Kath mentioned a school that had shifted its practice from traditional learning to inquiry based. The student voice showed a difference in how pupils viewed the question of “what makes a good learner?” Children write that they used to think that a good learner had a straight back and always put their hand up, showing that they saw good learners as linked with compliance. My question is: How does this compare to the PB4L model of explicit examples to improve/maintain positive behaviour in a school.

Video of PYP school: Organised classroom so children can find own resources, teacher often poses a question as the learning intention, e,g, ‘we are learning to identify shapes’ becomes ‘how can we identify which shape this is?’ Learning intentions and success criteria is often given as “we are learning to… we are showing our learning by….”

Split Screening

The idea behind this is so that children don’t come out of a maths lesson thinking they have only learnt about maths, there should be a skill they have learnt which can be applied to any context. Consider having an overarching inquiry question such as “what are we learning about ourselves as learners?”

Flipping the Learning

To model a flipped lesson, Kath used the question: What makes a powerful opening to a story? She gave a number of examples and asked us to choose one that stood out as powerful. She recorded our responses as to why we thought the opening was powerful and used that as the criteria, rather than giving us criteria to work from.

She played the video, “Sidewalk Flowers”, a video showing a book without words. We were then tasked with coming up with an opening line for this story.

I do it, We do it, You do it: The traditional lesson sequence. Gradual vs immediate release of responsibility. Sometimes gradual release isn’t enough, sometimes immediate release is required for truly authentic learning to take place.

What is effective feedback? Children need to have examples of effective feedback in order to give it to their peers, but how are those examples presented? Kath gave envelopes of strong and weak feedback to groups and asked students to rate each piece of feedback. Students then went to other groups and compared how they had rated feedback and discussed with each other.

Creating Authentic Moments: Video of Oakley Creek school from Boulder, CA.

Kath also showed us pictures of an example of spontaneous inquiry learning in a class where an arborist was cutting down a tree outside the window. The children wanted to watch and were granted permission to explore the topic, even inviting the arborist to come to speak to their class. Another example was the “Bin Chicken”, the plague of the ibis terrorising children in the playground. The resulting inquiry expanded to include creating ‘owls’ to put up around the school as a deterrent as well as a deeper appreciation of the plight of the species and the consequences of littering and human encroachment on natural habitats.

One class organised their own trip to the zoo, including budgeting, scheduling the day, creating permission slips, arranging transport to the zoo and ensuring school protocol is followed. One thing which I am keen to explore is having my Year 5/6 class organise the school athletics day in week 3 next term.

Having broad enough questions is important to ensure a range of experiences can be incorporated within a particular theme. What does art teach us about history? What makes a great film/story? How do forces affect our daily lives? It would be good if the planning for this included a split screen, e.g. What am I doing as a thinker?

Often classes will do an individual inquiry as well as a shared whole-class inquiry, where students choose a topic linked to their own interests. This can mean a class has a plethora of inquiries happening across a range of contexts, for instance one student could be researching the suffragette movement and another the space programme.

One activity Kath gave us was to walk around the room and read statements relating to agency, then share back at our tables what connections we had made with the readings, what ideas challenged our beliefs and what questions we had for the future.

The last video was one of a toddler walking a labrador, leaving the dog and running through a puddle several times before returning to the dog, taking the leash and walking on. This metaphor shows the learner as the risk taker, able to explore tangents while the teacher waits patiently, supporting the learner in their personal endeavour.

DMIC: Developing Mathematical Inquiry in a Learning Community

Today in our second callback day we had a PD session from CeRME and Massey University on developing maths inquiry. Our session started with a talk about the traditional accessibility of maths and mathematical development. We need to promote a love of maths as lifelong learners, often children have not had the opportunity to access certain educational opportunities.

Discussion on the Numeracy Project- ability groups were detrimental to learning as it kept them down a stage because they were not able to solve a problem in a certain way. Too many different strategies were learnt and children got confused. Numeracy project focused on number to the detriment of strand, the fun part.

Measurement learning should always start with non-standard units. Gave example of new-entrants class using non-standard ‘shoes’ units to measure a mat. Using a sheet of paper to teach right angles, fold to teach 45 degrees etc.

The 7 Mathematical Practices that were discussed were: Making a claim, Developing mathematical explanations, Justifying thinking, Constructing viable arguments, Generalising a Mathematical Idea, Representing Maths ideas using numbers, pictures and materials (gave an example of building with uni-fix blocks to learn volume), Using Maths language. Mistakes are powerful learning opportunities, being numerate involves having a good concept of estimation, knowing that the reversibilty of addition and multiplication does not translate to subtraction- something that I have already identified in my classroom this year.

Much of what he said were things I had already heard in University, a decade ago. I think it is interesting that the same conversations are happening after 10 years, for instance don’t tell kids the answer, don’t dumb things down, introduce algebra as addition problems with a missing digit.

Introducing Problems: Present problem, read it, ask someone to explain what is happening in the problem and get someone else to re-voice it. Part of the planning has to involve all the ways the children could get it wrong- plan for misconceptions. When sharing answers, don’t forget to re-state the problem, e.g. 29 x 15 is 29 leis x 15 people. Insteead of the close-ended “any questions?” try “what questions could we ask here?” to elicit more conversations.

Knowing when to park problems- for instance “add a zero” instead of times by ten- and when to address it is a balancing act, you want to harness the teachable moment but not get derailed by going off on a tangent. When introducing a new solution, e.g. the grid multiplication method, you should allow a tangent of giving at least another 2 problems to consolidate. Visual representation cannot be underestimated, e.g drawing the problem to clarify the final step when solving a problem like 29 x 15 using rounding and compensation (take away 1 or take away 15).

There are strong similarities with the White Rose Project in the UK. Higher ability students need to explain it to the rest of their group and try to find another way to solve the SAME problem, before moving on to solve a different. Limit the time in senior classes to about 15 minutes of problem solving in groups before moving on. Make explicit the links to Mathematical Practices when you see them in action in the class, highlighting the behaviours when you see them so that students see the value in the solving of the problem.

Setting Up the Class: Seniors, split class into halves and see each half on alternate days. Strength based social grouping, groups of 4, one challenging task and allocate roles. !0 minutes warm up, 5-10 minutes for launch 15 mins group activity, 15 mins large group discussion, 10 mins making connections to big ideas. Juniors split class into halves but groupings are in twos or perhaps threes if there is a non-verbal (or non-counter) student. Other class doing task rotations, e.g. make 10 with counters, make 6 etc. Warm ups can be a problem or ain introduction to a new activity to be used by the non-taught half of the class. Teacher role- anticipate, monitor, select, sequence, connect.

Older children do one problem a day, younger ones do three or so versions of the same problem. Older children have a more complex problem. Ask the children who you saw solve the problem using the correct strategy to share, and only them, not the ones who have not got to that stage. After they have shared, get all the children to repeat the strategy to make sure they have followed it. When moving to next iteration of the problem, make clear that you would like to see this strategy used to solve it. Then move to an open ended task or problematic task.

Independent work should be purposeful. Make the practice related to previous problems, e.g use problems from previous day, week or last term, refer students to solved problems from the wall. Can use mathletics, games usually end up being about winning than about maths learning, and it usually gets noisy. Have some open-eended quesitons e.g what things in the class have 4 sides? How many ways can you make 15? Sorting shapes, finding objects larger/smaller than 1 metre etc, weighs more than 1kg. There were 24 legs in the park, what animals were there?

Talk Moves: Restate, Repeat, Reasoning, Add On, Waiting. Restate is Teacher verifying what a student has said and clarifying anything. This gives a bit of think space for all students and makes the idea accessible. Repeat-teacher asks another student to repeat what the last student said. Reasoning- teacher asking other students whether they agree or disagree with another’s answer, can be asked to prove it. Add on extends the explanation, would someone like to add on to that? Wait Time- total silence, teacher counts to 10 in head, communicates expectation that everyone has something important to contribute.

Using questions to justify their answers instead of accepting correct answers or stating that an answer is incorrect. Begin the term by asking: What makes a good mathematician? Compare answers like “Knowing your timestables” with “Taking risks, justifying answers” which should replace the former after some time spent seeing maths in this way.

During the launch, make sure the problem is visible to all students. During small group discussion, provide individual think time before sharing answers. Make sure the topic is relevant to the learner’s own experience- don’t assume children will be able to relate to the situation, e.g. filling up a car with petrol.

Trevor also introduced us the the concept of a Quick Image, an image that is flashed quickly across the screen and students have to say how many dots there are on a screen. The focus is not on how many dots there are, but how you worked out how many there were, for instance 7 dots flashed up as 2 dots, 2 dots and 3 dots scattered across the screen.

Play Based Learning

Today I attended a PD session on Play Based Learning held at Ormiston Primary School in Flat Bush. We discussed the theory and research behind Play Based Learning. Here are my notes from the session:

In Play Based Learning there are 3 main educators: the Children, The Learning Environment and finally the teacher.

What is the role of the child during PBL? Independently selecting resources- this can be a very hard task for some as many rely on the adults in their life to do this for them. Talking and sharing with their peers allows for rich learning to take place amongst students. The teacher can also take the place as a student in these interactions, allowing the pupil to become the authority in games and play based investigations.

The role of the Learning Environment: How could I use this area to stretch thinking and learning? Use of open ended resources and following the interests of your learners to help dictate your resources. An open-ended resource is a thing that does not have a fixed-purpose design, e.g. a toy dinosaur can only be seen as a dinosaur, however a stone or a shell could be a phone, a car etc. Use of outdoor learning environments, water play, and use of incidental items such as large cardboard boxes from school deliveries provide different opportunities for learning.

The role of the Teacher in PBL: Facilitate, observe children’s play, listen to questions and share stories, record, reflect, respond, play alongside, gather an idea of their interests. At Ormiston, three teachers meet together and plan their sessions, what questions are going to be asked, how to set up etc. During the lessons they take notes and photographs to document the student’s learning and as a record of assessment. They begin each session with 5-10 min discussion about learners’ ideas, use photos or video of the students’ own work, and add depth to their learning by setting up a new provocation each day.

Teachers in PBL gather for a reflection everyday after the sessions. They ask what learning did we see, how were resources used, do we need to enhance those resources? How can we stretch them into the Zone of Proximal Development?