Janeen - Effective Teaching Practise

A huge focus this year through our 'EffectiveTeaching Practice' is to develop further our understanding about 'Acceleration' and to apply best practices and strategies for this in our teaching and learning programmes.  The main focus is to accelerate our students in writing. This lead me to my inquiry question 'How can I develop student agency to help accelerate learning?'  Below shows my thinking to further research to get a better understanding of this.   What is student agency?  My thoughts - the student takes greater control, ownership and responsibility of their own learning.  Students lead their own learning by directing their own learning pathway, setting their own goals, and making their own decisions instead of the teacher directing it.  

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.  

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...