Inquiry: Engaging students in deeper learning

Laurie Stowell San Marcos Writing Project

Quickwrite:

Why are you teaching? What got you into teaching? What are you passionate about? What do you look forward to everyday when you head out to your classroom?

Rank the discussions:

Read the four short transcripts (assuming they are representative of much longer discussions): A, B, C, D and rank them: 1) best example of a class discussion to 4) worst . Be prepared to explain your reasoning.

What are good discussions?

 What are the standards for good classroom discussion?

 What are the most powerful purposes and outcomes of good classroom discussion?

 What are the qualities that mark good classroom discussions?

 What should be the students’ role and the teachers’ role in a good classroom discussion?

 What moves should a teacher make to facilitate good classroom discussion? What moves should the students be making?

 What does a good discussion look, sound and feel like to participants? To observers?

What are effective discussions and how can we help students get that into their writing?

“Writing floats on a sea of talk.”

-James Briton

Inquiry oriented discussions:

 Build off a big, initial question that provides a clear purpose: the big question declares the problem or task to be tackled.

 Generate new, compelling open-ended questions that are posed and pursued by both teachers and students  Invite exploration: students play around and take risks as they pursue answers to the big idea  Encourage students to feel free to put forth tentative theories

 Allow students to do the work and do it together. Many students talk.

 Focus on compelling ideas and significant processes not just on getting a single correct answer.

 Entertain various perspectives and cultivate students’ appreciation of- and ability to handle – complexity.

 Involve applications that have a place in the real world.

 Cast the teacher in role of facilitator and guide – not answer giver

“Students enter school as question marks and graduate as periods.”

• -Neil Postman

What is inquiry?

“The process of addressing problems expressed by guiding questions.” ( Wilhelm)

Inquiry based learning

http://www.youtube.com/watc h?v=sLqi0raxldc&feature=relat ed

Piaget: “Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it.”

Hillocks meta-analysis:

 What are the most effective modes of instruction in the teaching of composition?

 He analyzed all the studies on teaching composition and categorized the modes into:   Grammar instruction Free write     Sentence combining Models Scales Inquiry

Hillocks research

Inquiry:

“Inquiry focuses the attention of students on strategies for dealing with sets of data, strategies that will be used in writing. For example, treatments categorized as inquiry might involve students in finding and stating specific details that convey personal experience vividly, in examining sets of data to develop and support explanatory generalizations or that present ethical problems and in developing arguments about those situations.” -Hillocks, 1986

…the teacher plans and uses activities that result in high levels of student interaction concerning particular problems parallel to those they encounter in certain kinds of writing, such as generating criteria and examples to develop extended definitions of concepts or generating arguable assertions from appropriate data and predicting and countering opposing arguments…This mode places a priority on high levels of students involvement… This mode places priority on structured problem solving activities with clear objectives, planned to enable students to deal with similar problems in composing.” - Hillocks

Why inquiry?

Most effective mode of composition instruction (Hillocks research) And

Engages learners

(engagement research)

What keeps teachers teaching?

 Teaching as evolution  Teaching as autobiography  Teaching as love  Teaching as hope and possibility  Teaching as anger and desperation  Teaching as intellectual work  Teaching as democratic practice  Teaching as shaping the future (article #74)

Quickwrite:

Think about some aspect of your curriculum you are really passionate about teaching and/or learning. What is it? What content do you get really excited about teaching and learning with your students? Why? What excites you about it? What do you look forward to learning? To doing?

Topical Inquiry:

 Engages with a disciplinary question  Explores what is already known  Explains and interprets the established data, articulates connections seen in the data

Setting up inquiry:

 1. Identify an essential question and associated enduring understandings  2. Identify a final project: what can students do at the end of the unit that will demonstrate their knowledge.  3. Create a backwards plan: a carefully ordered set of activities that support students’ progress, text by text and activity by activity.

Getting started with a question:

Reframe standards as essential questions

 Go through your standards and circle all the verbs. The higher level thinking skills the standards call for, the easier they can be met by inquiry: * “identify”, “discuss”, “use” are low level thinking * “identify and define” and “discuss craft” are mid level * “evaluate”, “relate”, “connect”, “question”, “analyze” are higher level thinking.

What are the questions worth pursuing?

• What would you do for love? What makes good relationships?

 Civil rights movement: What are our civil rights and how can we protect and promote them?

 Is war ever necessary?

 What is courage?

 What happened to the dinosaurs?

 Is Holden Caulfield a typical teenager or pathological adolescent?

 What’s wrong with our school and how can we improve it?

 In what ways do present cultures relate to their past and future?

 Can liberty and security be balanced?

 What makes an influential historical figure?

 What are the costs and benefits of cloning stem cell research?

 What is our proper relationship to nature?

 What are the effects of genetically altered organisms?

 Is progress always good?

 What is a good leader?

 What makes a good home –for us, for lobsters, bears?

An essential question:

 Honors students “reality principle”. It addresses their point of view and need for inquiry to be interesting and relevant in their terms.

 Addresses the “heart of the discipline” being studied. Essential disciplinary knowledge is required to answer it.

 Possesses “emotive force, intellectual bite or edginess”. It invites students into ongoing conversation and debates about real world disciplinary issues.

 Is open-ended, possible to contend, arguable. It must be complex enough to house multiple perspectives and possible answers.

 Is concise and clearly stated  Is linked to data. There are available resources to use in the pursuit of answers.

 May lead to new questions asked by students.

What could be questions worth pursuing in your class?

(related to your curriculum)

Identify a final project:

 Identify your absolute bottom-line goals for student achievement during the unit. The goals should be enduring understandings – conceptual and procedural tools that can serve students’ future work in the disciplines, their future thinking and living.

 After identifying goals, brainstorm what kinds of projects/writing would demonstrate student attainment, understanding, mastery or use of concepts and procedures.

Examples:

 If the question is: Why did the Union win the Civil War? The final project might be a written argument, multimedia display or living-history museum.

 If the question is: What makes a good home? The final project might be to create a living history museum of different habitats with students playing roles as animals and wildlife biologists. Or students could create Big Book stories about finding the right habitat from the point of view of the animal or sea creature.

“If our students’ goal is to share their fascination with a topic and their ideas about it, then instead of writing like encyclopedias they’ll be writing in the literacy nonfiction tradition of John McPhee and E.B. White.” -Lucy Calkins

Create a backwards plan

 What do students know and need to know?

 What can we do as a whole group/ small groups/individually?

 What kind of frontloading do we need to do?

 What resources do I need? Resources available for students?

 What print and nonprint resources are available?

 What kind of time do students need?

 How will I support them as they pursue individual projects?

 What kinds of checkpoints can I build in to support students’ independent work?

 How will students demonstrate their learning?

Youtube Resources:

 Jeff Wilhelm on Inquiry based learning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x pTBZw8mg&feature=topics  Inquiry based learning in an 8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Lh5MfyE E&feature=related th grade science class:  4 th grade inquiry: Designing a school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPrfbiVZmxo&f eature=fvwrel

 Teaching inquiry learning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwCmCJ8OhWY &feature=related  Teaching with inquiry circles in the elementary classroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb9cr4FPU_o&f eature=related  The steps of inquiry learning demonstrated through HSIE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DbWpo9yX00& feature=related

Multigenre writing

Another way to pursue inquiry and demonstrate understandings

Multigenre and Common Core

Using multiple sources of information, analyzing and synthesizing then producing multiple genres to demonstrate learning.

Multi-genre writing

Genres can be combined in one format:  Magazines  Zines  Newspapers  Informational picture books  Anthology

Multi-genre writing

Or students and teachers can enter into a kind of contract identifying a particular number of different genres to answer their question.

Getting started:

 Identify question(s)  Identify sources  Identify forms

Cohesion and flow

The project should be arranged in some logical order. The writer needs to create a cohesion or flow to the project.

How do spiders spin webs?

 Two voice poem  Diary of a spider  6 word memoir  Song (using old Spiderman tune)  Comic strip  Obituary  Recipe for a web

Student Samples: Ellis Island

Salem Witch Trials

Walt Disney”

Newsies:

Ben and Jerry’s:

Digital Multigenre projects:

 Aretha Franklin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFV5OyvnouE&feat ure=related  Bob Dylan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK1Vp6X_Tw8&feat ure=related  A first year teacher’s multi-genre paper: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14OF1fhKPts&featur e=related  Walt Disney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMopnh0QRyo&feat ure=related

Multi genre resources:

 Ms. Hogues’ online resources: http://mshogue.com/ce9/multi_genre/multigenre.

htm  A curriculum web for students writing multi-genre papers: https://www.msu.edu/~leboeufb/eng313/index.ht

m  Sample multigenre projects: http://writing.colostate.edu/gallery/multigenre/in dex.htm

Resources from Tom Romano

 Tom’s website with sample multigenre assignments, rubrics and papers: http://www.users.muohio.edu/romanots/Tom_Ro mano.html

 Multi-genre man: Tom Romano: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lucLoTMXxoE &feature=related

Print Resources:

 Burke, J. (2010) What’s the big idea? Question driven units to motivate reading, writing and thinking. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

 Harvey, S. (1998) Nonfiction matters: Reading, writing

and research in grades 3-8. York, Maine: Stenhouse.

 Nieto, S. (2003) What keeps teachers teaching? New York: Teachers College Press.

 Putz, M. (2006) A teacher’s guide to multigenre research project. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

 Romano, T. (2000) Blending genre, altering style:

Writing multigenre papers.

 Smith, M. & J. Wilhelm. (2002) Reading don’t fix no Chevys. Portsmouth: Heinemann  Smith, M. & J. Wilhelm. (2006) Going with the flow:

(How to engage boys (and girls) in their literacy learning.

Portsmouth: Heinemann  Wilhelm, J. (2007) Engaging readers and writers with inquiry. New York: Scholastic.