Pennies on a Bridge Inquiry Card – used for the DRiVe activity

If you want more then check out what’s on offer this August up at SFU
Summer Workshop: Smarter Science (August 21 & 22)

Weblinks

• Inquiry Cards
• Posters (8 ½ x 11)
• Teacher source website ($US, bulk order b/c shipping cost)
• Learning Science Through Inquiry: Using Questions to Lead Learning
• PEOE approach: We didn’t show this in the workshop but it is third approach that may be of interest.

Books

• Inquire Within (VSB Book Club 2012/2013)
• Teaching Highschool Science through Inquiry and Argumentation
• Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions
• Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry: Promoting Deep Understandings in Language Arts and the Content Areas With Guiding Questions

The students went to the crime scene in groups and had to stay on the other side of the police tape.

Having already reviewed the story of the crime, the students had to observe the room and decide what evidence they wanted analyzed.  They compiled a list of objects and described what they wanted them tested for.  For example, the glass cup should be checked for fingerprints.

They were given any evidence that they found that went with the Death on Denman case file that was shared last year.

NOTE: The students really enjoyed the crime scene and have suggested some ways that we can make it more interactive next year!

One of the key facets of the QFT is that the teacher starts the process with a Question Focus.  This is a teacher prompt that provides a focus for questions students will create.  Here are examples of how Darren Elves’ does this in his primary classroom: example 1, example 2, example 3.  Darren  has a great post on how he uses the QFT with primary students.

Looking at the proposed design for the “new” BC curriculum I can see how I would use the QFT to start each unit.  

Above is a draft copy of  the Science 7 curriculum.  I think each Enduring Understanding would make a great Question Focus.  The Content that students are expected to know and understand are helpful when Prioritizing Questions (part of the QFT).  As students pursue answers to their questions (via various means) I would emphasis the process in order to develop students’ ability to Inquire, Reason, and Apply (the Curricular Competencies).

Blending into the unit would be the Cross Curricular Competencies.  I see a significant Language Arts (Written & Oral language) learning and application within the study of Science questions and the ecosystem understandings connect to some of the civilization understandings in the current SS7 PLO.  There is so much opportunity for creative and engaging teaching — would definitely want at least 1 or 2 colleagues to collaborate with on the work:)

Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions

A guest post by Carl Sommerfeld, a science teacher at John Oliver Secondary where he shares his experience of “teaching students to ask their own questions” by using the question formulation technique shared in the book “Make Just One Change”.

Recently I decided to introduce the Nervous System to my Biology 12 students in an unconventional way.

With a Focus Statement guiding their brainstorming session, small groups came up with their own questions about what they’d like to learn about the Nervous System and Marijuana.

“The human body, and society as a whole, need not fear marijuana as it is a natural product” was the statement at the top of their handout, replete with rules for coming up with questions during group time and what to do with them when they were finished.

To further spark interest, especially in my kinaesthetically gifted students, five models of the head and brain were procured from our media services department at the board, one for each group. It’s amazing how touching and fumbling with pieces of a model can engage students and further probe their curiosity.

Generating Questions

The questions were wide ranging, from the personally curious “Why does marijuana give a person the munchies?” to the narrative style  “Did Mr Sommerfeld ever smoke marijuana?” to the scientific “Is marijuana addictive?” and “What are marijuana’s effects on the nervous system?”

The questions came slow at first but the pace quickened, helped by different coloured markers and large poster paper. The group members had wide ranging abilities and interests and yet the rules stated that all questions were acceptable and to be recorded verbatim. No discussion was allowed, nor judgment around what constituted a good question. This was not the time for answering or discussing, just questions.

Examples of Student Questions

Fifteen minutes later the average group had close to 30 questions, both open-ended “What is marijuana?” and closed-ended “Is it harmful to the human body?”

After labelling all questions as either “O” or “C” they had to change one open-ended question to a closed-ended, and vice versa.  I asked them which type of question they’d prefer on a test – they had reasons for both. I asked them what type of questions their parents asked; what types of questions were useful for group discussions?

Seeing what your peers are curious about

Posting each groups colourful montage of questions with big pieces of tape allowed them to see what their peers wondered about. If the student’s had it their way research would have started right then. I wish this was the norm.

The handout prescribed the need to prioritize their questions and copy down the three best, in order of importance. The following class was booked in the computer lab where research was undertaken on an individual basis.

The third class saw them getting together in their original groups to collate the research on the three questions and report back to me. Each group had their own highlighter and chose those bits suitable to answer the questions best.

Prioritizing the Questions

As a beginning teacher it will take time for me to guide students into questions that will reach the level expected at the senior level, and even more time for students to rearrange their perspectives and abilities to ask better questions.

A colleague mentioned maybe the answers don’t even matter as much as the questions that are being generated. Maybe the students wonder about more than what movie stars had for breakfast or who married who’s best friends’ daughter’s ex-boyfriend. And maybe helping them think differently isn’t so difficult after all.

The distinction between learning contexts and learning intentions is an important pre-requisite to realizing the improvement in student learning which education research evidence suggests is achievable.

A common trap for teachers is to focus on the context for learning (i.e. the activity, project, experiment, novel, etc.) and overlook the learning intention it was meant to serve.

Wiliam emphasizes that we “have to be able to distinguish between the intended learning outcomes and the instructional activities that we hope will result in those outcomes, and this is a distinction that many teachers find hard to make.” (p.60)

Wiliam states “this is why good teaching is so extraordinarily difficult.  It is relatively easy to think up cool stuff for students to do in classrooms, but the problem with such an activity-based approach is that too often, it is not clear what the students are going to learn.”  I agree that it is hard to teach well in a classroom that has a curriculum that is built upon activities but do not agree with his claim that good teaching is difficult.

Most teachers are able to quickly comprehend the distinction between learning intentions and learning contexts (though the language may be new to some).  The truly difficult part for us is letting go of the activities that we either feel compelled to “teach” or upon which we have built our units of instruction.  The challenge is not teaching but rather designing learning environments that are built upon learning intentions and not upon activities.  The hard work is to first identify and clarify the key learning intentions for our respective courses.  Having done that, we then can use key learning intentions as a lens to critically evaluate the efficacy of  the activities in supporting the learning of students.  Note: I am not criticizing any particular activity but rather emphasizing the importance of teacher clarity around the purpose of the activity.

I believe that the “good teaching” that Wiliam’s writes about is achievable.  In one-on-one conversations I have had with many teachers representing a range of experience, subject areas, and districts, all have had the “aha moment” early in the conversation.  Learning objectives can often be muddy or unspecified (mea culpa) but once clarified one has a lens to examine a learning activity and better distinguish between what students were expected to be learning and how they were going about doing the learning.  Wiliam provides examples in the table below.

Examples of Confused and Clarified Learning Intentions

Note: It is helpful to characterize high quality learning intentions as ones that are transferable from one learning context to another.  By focusing on learning intentions that are “global” in nature we are able to highlight the elements of a course, even a content-heavy one, which are core to the subject (example).  We are also better able to assess students for deep learning by observing “their ability to apply their newly acquired knowledge to a similar but different context” (Wiliam, 2011).  And lastly, we can see how we might, in a manageable way, “differentiate instruction without creating a classroom in which different students are working towards different goals” (Wiliam 2011).  This opens a world of possibility for teacher and student creativity in applying, demonstrating, and building upon new learning.

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box. Phi Delta Kappan, 8(2), p 139(9)

Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington: Solution Tree.

The research evidence for the benefits of sharing learning intentions and success criteria is powerful and persuasive.

Wiliam provides an overview of an extensive body of research evidence that points to increased learning for all students, when learning intentions and success criteria are clear, shared and understood.  In particular, the greatest gain in learning is observed in those students who are commonly seen as low achieving.  In a collaborative environment this closing of the achievement gap is a positive outcome.

Wiliam identifies that the cause of the achievement gap is that “often, what is wanted is not made clear, and this puts some students at considerable advantage because they already know.”  These are the students who are able to “work with unresolved ambiguities about what they are doing, while those students seen as lower achieving were struggling because they were trying to do something much more difficult.” (Gray and Tall 1994).  Those students who are able to intuit the implied learning intention(s) are at a significant advantage over those who cannot – hence the decreased achievement gap when learning intentions are made explicit.  This suggests that many students who carry the label “low achieving” or “underachieving” may simply be “low intuiting” and this has social-emotional as well as achievement impacts.

Wiliam does not address the social-emotional impact of sharing learning intentions and success criteria but I would suggest that it reduces both teachers’ stress and students’ stress.  Wiliam shares Mary Alice White’s 1971 “The view from the student’s desk”:

The analogy that might make the student’s view more comprehensible to adults is to imagine oneself on a ship sailing across an unknown sea, to an unknown destination.  An adult would be desperate to know where he is going.  But a child only knows he is going to school… The chart is neither available nor understandable to him… Very quickly, the daily life on board the ship becomes all important… The daily chores, the demands, the inspections become the reality, not the voyage, nor the destination. (p.340)

In my classrooms I have observed many students carry a hidden anxiety that manifests itself in many different ways including over-achievement driven by insecurity, disengaged compliance, and disruptive avoidance behaviour to name a few.  I have observed sharing clear and explicit learning intentions having a significant impact in reducing the behaviours listed and improved focus for student learning.

Imagine now the teacher holding the rudder of White’s ship but without a chart in hand and without a clear destination in mind.  Would they not also find the voyage an anxious one?  Would they not be desperate to know where they are going?  It is my personal experience, and my observation of colleagues, that teachers who invest time and energy in clarifying and understanding learning intentions also reap a significant personal benefit in reduced anxiety and increased confidence as a result of their new-found clarity.

Works Dylan Wiliam Cites and Further Reading

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box. Phi Delta Kappan, 8(2), p 139(9)

Clarke, S. (2005).  Formative assessment in the secondary classroom.  London: Holder & Stoughton.

White, M. A. (1971). The view from the student’s desk.  In M. L. Silberman (Ed.), The experience of schooling (p. 340 New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Gray, E. M., & Tall, D. O. (1994). Duality, ambiguity and flexibility: A “proceptual” view of simple arithmetic. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 25(2),116-140.

Recommended Assessment Reading

Resources that make explicit the links between self-regulation and learning.
Note: authors include UBC’s Deborah Butler and Nancy Perry.

A condensed overview of AfL which makes the point that “what we need is a shift from quality control in learning to quality assurance.”  Note: AfL forms part of the foundation for “learners owning their own learning”.

Microsoft Clip Art 2012

During the past two weeks I have been collaborating/team-teaching with a colleague.  One thing that came out of that time was a unit overview for the Electricity topic of the BC Science 9 curriculum.

The unit overview addresses all four ministry-mandated Prescribed Learning Outcomes for Science 9 Electricity as can be seen in this working version of the Electricity unit overview.

Students have found them to be very useful. They use them to see what we are going to learn, refer to them during the learning and use them for filtering what they know from what they don’t know when preparing for an exam. They also act as organizers for their notebooks. This will be helpful when they begin preparing for their year end exam.

The “owning my learning” theme is also working well. The students seem to feel more responsible for their learning in general. I see them checking off the B and A columns on the sheets, being honest with themselves about what they feel they know and what they need to work on. They appear to like seeing in print all of the ideas that they have learned. Rather than being intimidated, they appear to be proud.

An unforeseen advantage has been that the learning intentions sheets have helped with students who are away from school for extended periods of time. They can see what work we are covering in their absence and try to keep up.

I have taken out the references to the textbook and have been referring to the learning by the title I have given each section, not by the chapter number. Students have realized on their own where they can find supporting information in the textbook without me having to use specific page references all of the time or give assigned reading.

I am happy with the way in which this is unfolding and am glad that I attended the workshop last February. I feel this project has helped my students see where I wish to take them in their learning and to feel ownership in their journey.

Karen Greig

Link to Karen’s Science 8 and Science 10 “unit plans”.