Janeen - Effective Teaching Practise

What is student inquiry? This very question has taken me on a journey of much discovery from readings to understanding more clearly 'What is inquiry?' but furthermore 'Where does the learner fit into this?' And 'How this benefits the learner.' Weaknesses Teaching inquiry this year I've observed students who are below or well below struggle to understand the concept of inquiry.  More importantly the learner has not yet developed the necessary key competencies to be able to inquiry.   There are many actions to teach around inquiry and trying to do all of this at once can overwhelm the learner as they do need plenty of practice to feel confident to do inquiry learning independently. First and foremost it starts with having the confidence to pose questions, and the learners need to be immersed in these.  For example posing questions could be a reading focus for small groups and as a teacher you're giving explicit teaching around this.  Students

As follows is an example of what an inquiry support process could look like to guide students with their learning.  

Here is our own class 'INQUIRY' action model the students are currently using to support them in their learning to inquire. We looked at a variety of inquiry models on the internet.  This helped us to brainstorm our very own actions where we were able to go from one action to another without any systematic order.   After several weeks of using this we evaluated our class inquiry model - such as 'Did we need to add any other actions?'  Or 'Reword actions?'  Or take away actions as they weren't relevant for us as learners.  The students did add another action 'Collect Data' as they felt this was necessary because quite often they did student voice surveys and graphs to help them plan next steps for their inquiry investigation. The students and I also added help idea prompts around each action to give them (students) even more support and direction around planning next steps for their inquires.  For example some 'Reflection' ac

This is an inquiry model I used for our 'Successful Communities' inquiry.  My first thoughts?  Would students be able to understand this? And would this model support their inquiry learning? Once we did the learning wall under each 'process' for example 'Getting started' 'Planning info' 'Collecting info' as mentioned in my previous post - students showed understanding of each one, however the questions under each heading were confusing some students.  Their thoughts were - too wordy, it was hard to follow, do I answer all the questions under each heading before moving on? The 'process' had really informative headings which can steer a student's inquiry, however this inquiry 'process' needed to be changed in order for my students to be able to inquiry on their terms and have freedom to move around an 'action' without having a systematical process. This prompted me to think about including the students to cre

Minute by minute 'Formative Assessments' These are some examples I used with my students from 'Learning in the fast lane' by S. Pepper Rollins.  According to Pepper Rollins (2014) it's to administer frequent ungraded assessments for formative purposes that focus on helping students learn rather than measure what they already learned (or didn't learn).  I agree with this statement as with these rich formative assessments students are able to identify their next learning steps, teachers can provide good feedback and feedforward to steer their students in the right direction, and students feel more confident to perform an activity or task knowing what they've achieved so far and what they still need to achieve.   I did the 'stick it dot' formative assessment for speech writing and this gave me a clear indication to take a workshop of 'WALT expand our ideas.'  From the workshop this gave the students more confidence and a clearer underst

Reflection is such a vital part of being a teacher to know what went well in a lesson(s) and what could be improved for next time. Upon teaching my students the 'Inquiry Process' and building a learning wall to support their own inquiry learning, it came to my attention that students were still getting very confused about this whole thing about  INQUIRY.    Although the students helped create the learning wall based around an issue within our Manukorihi community, some students were still confused how to use the 'Inquiry Process' for their own inquiry investigations. According to J.Kellow 2012, the inquiry process and models are a guide however inquiry should never go through a step by step process.  I agree as the process we used was too controlled and rigid like J.Kellow 2012 suggested - where it lead the inquiry rather than the students themselves leading the inquiry.   From this, I decided to start again about INQUIRY .  I thought it was