Inquiry Staff Meeting

Last Tuesday we has an inquiry staff meeting where we discussed a number of issues related to how we were going with Inquiry.
Inquiry Learning – Where are we at???

What is good
Internet access – instant feedback/information is accurate.
Good teaching skills/ framework
Good buy in by the kids; motivated to find stuff out.
Wonderings are child generated.
Questioning skills.

What is not?
Lack of knowledge
Low skill level of children when knowing how to access information and interpret this.
Time constraints with CRT days etc
More time needed for children to reflect.

What Does it look like in class?
Organised chaos
Wonder walls
Interactive
Independent
Collaborative
Noisy
Busy
Motivated

How do we assess Inquiry currently?
Tick sheets
Rubrics
Self Assessment

Where do Thinking Skills fit in?
Hats enable us to think form different viewpoints
Develop higher order thinking
As a tool to analyse findings/ideas

Ou Lady of Lourdes

On Thursday Nick and myself (Roger) went to Our Lady of Lourdes school in Palmy with the rest of the ICWC cluster. It was an interesting day looking at their Inquiry Journey and meeting some wonderful children and staff. There was a really great atmosphere around the school with all the children open, helpful and enthusiastic. What a great school!

Main points noted:

• Whole staff PD focus
• Computers as a tool for learning
• Restrict the range of software
• Paid someone to maintain the website (actively collect material from staff and upload)
• Digital camera/ MP3 as class consumables
• ICT aspect to all assemblies
• Inquiry Modelling Book like Maths and Literacy
• What happens when ICT Lead Teacher moves on?
• Internet Safety taught in context
• Curriculum Planning- Inquiry focus whole school units
• Strategic ICT Plan with benchmarks and linked to Literacy and Library plans
• Inquiry Newsletter to inform parents
• Teacher's documentation of planning (unit plan, daily plan, inquiry book, student inquiry books)
• Fantastic AppleBook!- Publish a book of photos and text as a hard back- approx $2 per page...)
  

Action:

• Purchase an MP3/webcam for voice/video recording for podcasts and blog/vlogs
  
• Blog and comment with people outside the school (Buddy Class)
• Look at the steps within our Inquiry stages... (see Coley St visit)
• Whole school inquiry units... or least syndicate/ buddy class units
• Planning shared and displayed
  
• Blog from camp with images- keep parents and school inform and happy! This might need mobile 3G internet broadband connection...

Creating The Thinking Classroom

On Thursday, 4 members of staff went to see Eric Fragenheim (Rodin Educational Consultancy) in Palmy. Nick and Kirsty went to one of his presentations previously. Eric's presentation was excellent being very practical and applicable to classroom action... Some key points included:

• RAS Alert- tell your pupils what they are learning, why it is relevant and what to look for.
• Perception Check- find out what pupils are thinking, understanding...
• Imprecise question leads to imprecise thinking.
• Intelligence is a behaviour...
• Reflection and transfer of new ideas is essential for better understanding.
• Multiple Intelligence Model and Learning Styles.
• Blooms Taxonomy and Higher Order Thinkings Skills.

Some Specific Tools:

• Scavenger Hunts- gets pupils involved and primes/ introduces ideas, texts...
• T-Chart
• PMI
• Extended PMI
• PMImprove
• SWOT
  
• KWL- learning log, teacher assessment
  
• CAF- Consider All Factors
• Extent Barometer
  
• Tournament Prioritiser
• Decision Making Matrix
• SeeSaw
• Y Chart
• Silent Card Shuffle

Thoughts, ideas and questions raised:

• Look at our Inquiry Model and align it to Blooms Taxonomy including; HOTs, thinking skill verbs, thinking strategies...
• Add "Create" to the end of our Inquiry Model- Create- action, inform, make, publish...
• When planning a unit- consider how Blooms and thinking strategies can be integrated...esp HOTs
  
• Linked to "Hooked on Thinking..." Deeper Questions leads to Deeper Thinking...
• Goal Setting using Tournament Prioritiser/ PMI/ SWOT
  

A great day and so much to think about... BUT I have some activities and ideas I want to use in my class tomorrow!!!!

ICT Cluster Day at Coley Street

What a cool morning. I am only sorry I was not able to stay for the afternoon. The Journey Coley street have been only was both interesting and impressive. I was particularly impressed by the level of knowledge the children had. They were very articulate and had obviously been immersed in the language for some time.
The pure version of Inquiry was a neat concept. I think we are a mile away from that at the moment but I guess we all need to start somewhere.
Next week we have a group of rural principals visiting our school and after the great show the Coley kids gave us yesterday I am a bit nervous. The knowledge our children have about their thinking toolboxes etc pales in comparison. We will give it our best shot.
The level of PD we are getting on this contract is top notch. Being ale to work with a school like Coley Street on an ongoing basis and having them as a benchmark is great. I am very positive about the direction Opiki is heading and look forward to the "Our Lady of Lourdes" vist next month.

Coley Street Inquiry Journey

What an interesting morning. We found out about the Coley Street journey...

Implications and thoughts that arise:

• Develop, review and adapt our Inquiry Model.
• Discuss and develop stages within the process of Inquiry
• Exemplars need to be developed for the stages and process
• Inquiry Rubrics
• Oral language assessment
  
• Frameworks for tasks: telephone interview, web search, outside visit, wonderings...
• Graphic organisers
• Thinking Tool Box: Six Hats, Fogherty's Intellectual Storeys
  
• Directed, Guided and Pure inquiry for different years/ individuals...
• Language of inquiry...
• Pupil Ownership of Learning
• Sharing and celebrating of work
• Opportunities for teachers to plan and work together
• Encourage Buddy Classes
• Action from inquiry?

A lot to think over...

Term 2

So far...
Last term we continued to work on our inquiry model and the integration of ICTs into everyday learning. Every staff meeting we share examples of our ICT use and integration.

Inquiry Model














We have developed this model based on some teachers experience with Action Learning. We have already thought about combining some of the steps but will continue with the present this term.

Thinking Tool Box
We also had discussions about a thinking toolbox. We discussed tools and graphic organisers we have used in our classrooms and came up with a list and agreed we needed a school wide set so that there was a continuity of use and language.

Term 2
We are undertaking an inquiry unit in our classrooms this term and using the thinking hats and a range of graphic organisers to organise and extend thinking. In week 6 Jan Thomas is coming in to school for a staff meeting to discuss our progress and help us develop ideas...

Integration
We have had discussions about integrating ICT into our units. Ideas included:

• Animated movies to tell stories
• Video/ photo records of trips
• Wikispaces for noting taking and reporting
• Online timelines
• Online MindMaps
• Comicstrip software
• Podcasting/blogging our findings
• Internet research...
• Email, telephone, fax...

Our Plan

This promises to be a really exciting year on the ICT contract. We are really looking forward to the Inquiry focus. We worked on a school model last year and are looking to refine this further. Jan is running a staff meeting with both ourselves and St Marys Foxton in a few weeks which will be great.
The Thinking tools aspect is also exciting. Having been to an Eric Fangenheim (Rodin Education -Australia) workshop recently and got a pretty cool framework to work from and are looking at making our own "toolkit" up for this.
We decked out each classroom with a projector this year which has been well worth the cost and have just purchased Mathletics for our 3 more senior rooms which will prove a hit. We trialled this for 2 weeks with our Year 3/4 class and the improvements and enthusiasm was well documented both at school and home. We also leased a few more computers to give each room 5 which has gone down well with staff.
We are continuing to strive with integration across the curriculum with some teachers doing really well and others needing a bit of support, but this is all par for the course.