Debating: An inquiry-based activity for fueling ‘Thinking Empowered Learning’

This past week, the students in my classroom have been engaged in preparing for and completing a debate connected to our current unit of inquiry on scientific innovation, specifically aviation technology. As I reflect on the past week, I cannot help but think of how debating is a wonderful inquiry based activity that helps engage students in ‘Thinking Empowered Learning’.

In trying to define, inquiry based learning I came across the following article from The Ontario Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, Capacity Building Series on Inquiry-based learning.

Debating as an instructional activity, naturally places students’ in an atmosphere where they must develop questions, ideas and observations about the resolution being discussed. It also is a respectful way to challenge, test, and redefine ideas about difficult concepts that our students’ may be wondering about. In some cases, students may also be put in a position of defending a position other than their own, causing them to think deeply about the other side of the argument  and another point of view or perspective. By supporting students throughout this process, teachers help to engage students in real-world based thinking and provide them with the tools to using thinking to empower their learning in other situations.

As an inquiry based activity, students must research and construct arguments to support their side of their resolution. They also must listen carefully to the opposing perspective and think of ways to form a rebuttal. Through this process, students are challenged to think deeply about the issue being discussed and form their own understanding.

After my class had completed our debate activity, I had each student complete a reflection form where they identified what attributed of the IB Learner Profile and attitudes they had displayed or developed while preparing, debating, or observing. It was interesting to read their responses and the variety of attributed that they mentioned. I would have also liked to include the Approaches to Learning as I think that many of them used a wide number of these skills as well.

Below are some of the descriptions of the attributes my students felt that they displayed our developed through participating in an debate.

Preparation Phase
– Communicator – “I worked together with my partner to research and write down facts and decide who was going to say what.”~H
– Risk Taker – “I never debated before so I took a risk in trying something new.”~R
– Inquirer – “I had a lot of questions and I wanted to learn more about my topic.”~A
– Cooperative – “I had and idea and wanted to share it, I waited for the person talking to stop.”~S

Debate
– Knowledgeable – “I knew all of the ‘cons’ of aviation and I got to share it with others.” ~H- Enthusiasm – “You had to be excited about the topic and show you were happy to be there and happy to learn.”~R
– Open-Minded – “I had to listed to the oppositions notes in case I had to rebuttal and say something that I did not agree with.”~A
– Communicator – “I was talking to my audience and I thought about how to get their full attention and when I was presenting I gave them the full package.”~R
– Confidence – “I didn’t back down and I felt very confident in front of the class.”~B

Observing Other Debates
– Curious – “I wanted to know what the others’ side opinion was.”~H
– Thinker – “You have to be thinking, how could you make my debate better next time.”~R – Reflective “You have to reflect on the other debates and think how could I make my debate better.”~A

I would like to continue to explore the use of debate in the inquiry based classroom and develop some age appropriate resources for the students in the PYP. I believe that it is a wonderful activity to engage students in ‘Thinking Empowered Learning’.

The first week … No math, no reading, no writing … just building relationships and community

No math, no reading, no writing … just building relationships and community. Yes, that was my first week back and it felt great. Lots of smiling faces, kids playing, building, making, creating, and enjoying each others company.

Schools and classrooms are built on strong relationships so we need to give ourselves permission to allow those to develop before instruction can begin. In my class, I have a number of students who are brand new to the school. On Wednesday, you could see there nervous faces but by the end of today, it looked like they had all been at my school since Kindergarten.

We have started to build a trusting and caring community that will support our learning for the rest of the year. There is lots of time to do math, reading, and writing this year. I don’t regret spending this week creating our learning environment and building relationships. I know it is going to be beneficial over the course of the school year.

Evaluating using the WWWDOT Framework

Yesterday I came across this Edutopia article on the WWWDOT framework. I find that teaching students to be critical consumers of the information they read on the internet is a large task in Grade 6 so I am always looking for different strategies to help them with this process.

I decided to turn the 6 questions or steps into an infographic that I can display in my classroom or provide to students. I used a new to me tool, Venngage.com. It was pretty easy to pick up fairly quickly and the library of images and templates was excellent considering it is a free website.

Here is my finished product:

https://infograph.venngage.com/p/137187/wwwdot-framework

Source: Zhang, S., Duke, N. K. and Jiménez, L. M. (2011), The WWWDOT Approach to Improving Students’ Critical Evaluation of Websites. Read Teach, 65: 150–158.

Lessons Learned from PYP Exhibition

This year was my first time being the lead teacher on the PYP Exhibition at my school. In the past two years I have served as a mentor, but this year was my opportunity to step up and take on the leadership of the PYP Exhibition.

I was fortunate to be supported by my school to attend ‘The Exhibition (Category 2)’ training the face-to-face format. I found that attending the training was beneficial to fully understanding the purpose of exhibition both in my role as a homeroom teacher but also as the PYP Coordinator. ‘

Lesson #1 – The Exhibition is the responsibility of all teachers within the programme.
The Exhibition is the culmination of the PYP, and as a result, it is a reflection of everything that the students have developed as learners throughout the programme, not only in the final year. Often, the teacher who is responsible for leading the group of students through the exhibition feels an added level of pressure as they are directly responsible for the group of students. Taking time to establish essential agreements and understandings around the purpose of exhibition and the scope of exhibition will help to lay the ground work for meaningful conversation regarding student’s exhibition experience.

Lesson #2 – Invest in developing a detailed timeline in advance, but remain flexible!
There is no prescribed way to deliver the PYP Exhibition; however, there are many requirements as describe in the Exhibition Guidelines document. As a result, it is important to carefully consider what components of the exhibition process are required and allocated appropriate time and resources for them. Providing time for students to take community visits, have guest speakers, contact primary resources are all important elements to student led inquiry and all benefit from having a timeline. That being said, it is important to remain flexible and consider individual situations with professional judgement as learning is not a linear process.

Lesson #3 – Build in time and provide tools for reflection throughout the process.
In order to help keep the focus of the exhibition on the process of learning, instead of completely on the final product, make sure to build in non-negotiable time for reflection. Some of the ways that it did this included:

Daily Tracking Sheet

• Daily tracking sheets – Students take a few minutes at the beginning and end of every day to set priorities, acknowledge progress, and identify next steps.
• Weekly recap sheets – Each Friday, students had time to reflect on their week by answer open-ended questions and identifying the Learner Profile attribute, attitudes, and Approaches to Learning that they displayed, utilized, or applied that week.

Open Ended Questions

• Video Journals – At the completion of various stages of the inquiry process, students were provided with the same set of questions to answer. This was done multiple times and then students were able to look at how their answers were impacted by their research. By using the video format, it provided another modality for students to express themselves and talk about themselves as learners.

 

Lesson #4 – Communication is essential.
As the exhibition unit is a slightly different format from the rest of the programme of inquiry, it is essential to develop strong communication with the involved students, families, and wider school community to maintain a positive climate. It is important to acknowledge that exhibition will challenge the students involved, and there will be difficult situation to work through but at the core the process will be empowering and enjoyable for the students involved.

Lesson #5 – Document, document, document!
Take lots of pictures, shoot video, capture the learning in action. The exhibition process can be exhausting, overwhelming, and is over before you know it. Make sure to use technology to assist in the documentation process to help you remember all of the wonderful moments that happened throughout. Your documentation will be valuable to help with the assessment process, but also provides a vehicle for celebration.

Here is a video produced with some of my students talking about PYP Exhibition.

If you have other lessons that you have learned about PYP Exhibition, please comment below! We are better together, when we share and learn from each other.

 

 

Tackling Conferences as a Team

This past weekend, I was fortunate to attend the IB Annual Regional Conference of the Americas hosted in Toronto, Ontario. The theme for the conference was Learning Together, and there was over 1,400 educators from around the world in attendance. With the conference happening so close to my school, we were able to send a strong team of 19 to the conference from across the PYP, MYP and DP teaching teams within the school.

One of the challenges that I have experienced at conferences is often wanting to be in more than one place at a time. Often, there are two or more sessions happening simultaneously that I am interested in going to. The IB Conference is no exception to this rule! With having a strong team of people attending a conference together, it is possible to use technology to help everyone gather knowledge from multiple sessions that are happening at the same time so people don’t have to worry about not being in two places at once.

The first time that I saw this approach being used was at Integrated 2014 in Portland, Oregon. The conference organizers created a hyperlinked GoogleDoc that listed all of the conference sessions and encouraged participants to record there notes in the document for all of the conference attendees to share. Throughout the sessions, participants helped to build a robust document with notes from all of the sessions. After the conference, participants could read about other workshops, click on links and benefit from the shared knowledge of other participants. Even if you had attended this conference as the only teacher from your school or district, you still had a ‘team’ to learn with and from. Although this document was very useful, it was overwhelming the quantity of notes that it included and the context of note taking varied among participants.

If you are fortunate enough to be attending a conference with a team of educators from your school or district, it is a wonderful opportunity to harness technology to fuel a collaborative team approach to tackling the conference! It also allows members of your team who are not able to attend the conference to benefit from the knowledge gained at the conference as the document can be shared with a wider audience after the fact.

In advance of the conference, an online collaborative document can be created in a tool such as GoogleDocs and shared with the members of your team that are attending the conference. When setting up the document you might want to consider what format would make the most sense for note taking. Is there certain information that you would like from each session (i.e., names of the presenters, email addresses, links)? Do you want the notes to be anonymous or would you like people to attach their name to the notes? How can the ‘comments’ feature be used? Can a highlighting colour system be created to help draw attention to action items? One tip is to use the ‘Table of Contents’ feature within GoogleDocs to create a hyperlinked schedule at the beginning of the document to make navigation easier.

Following the conference, it might be helpful to have one person take a few minutes to ‘clean up’ up the document. This does not mean removing any notes, simply looking for places where there are extra spaces that could be removed, making font size consistent, and other things to make the document visually appealing for when it is shared with a wider audience.

In using this approach at the IB conference, I found that my own experience was enriched by the experiences of my colleagues who were also in attendance. I was able to gain knowledge from sessions I did not attend in person and I am able to start specific conversations with people about the sessions they attended.

I hope that this type of collaboration and sharing becomes a standard practice at more conference in the future.