A little experiment

I am very proud of the work my students have done this term. They're cooperating more, becoming independent, and taking responsibility for their learning. I saw this post on Adam Hill's blog about he and his teaching partner trying Silent Teacher Day and I thought it could be a useful strategy for my students to develop collaboration and independence as a team.

We're at the end of our How We Organize Ourselves unit. Now is the perfect time to try it.  We just came back from a 3 day field trip to Warsaw. On the trip students developed independence in organizing their rooms, their meals, their budget, and were in charge of their learning.

It was also a reflective trip for me. We traveled with my past students, who I taught for two years. It was interesting to see what skills and behaviors stayed the same and which they had left behind. After reflecting on the 3 day trip, my goal is to improve my student's ability to lead their own inquiry and motivate them to take control of their learning. 

I will be silent and passive with them all day, observing and analyzing, but not engaging with them. They will need to: figure what is going on, figure out what needs to happen, work together to accomplish the day's routine and learning activities. 

I think this is the perfect opportunity to try it out. Our unit is focused on how societies organize themselves.

Central Idea

Communities have created a variety of ways to organize rules and resources.

Lines of Inquiry

• There are a variety of ways to organize governments

• Government structures can be changed

• Governments have many responsibilities

I did not tell them that I will be silent and passive all day, but I did my best to prepare them. Today we discussed what needs to happen tomorrow so that they have a clear idea. I have set up the room for students to use our daily structure. 

Our morning meeting message includes what needs to be done, as does our agenda. As always, they will fix the errors in the paragraph, and I hope in having the discussion, it will reinforce what needs to be accomplished.

Our morning message

 I have set their attitudes on independence and cooperation to inspire them.These might seem at odds, but I need some of the students to focus on working independently, without me, and others to focus on working with their classmates to complete their tasks, rather than control each task. My attitude is set on being tolerant, but is also across commitment, a reminder to stick to the plan and let them work it out at their own pace.

Our attitudes

In case they are blurry eyed in the morning, I left them a little note to keep their attitudes in place. 

A brief reminder

I also set their daily tasks so they have another reminder of what to do.

Our routine

I know that it will be a real challenge for me to sit back quietly and not speak. I will want to intervene. I will want to help them solve whatever challenge they encounter. By sitting back and letting them solve it,  I hope that it will empower them to work through the chaos, work together, and guide their own learning. They will need to follow our essential agreements without my support.


I hope that the work I have done in the previous 11 weeks will give them some of the skills they need to motivate themselves, guide their own learning, and work cooperatively. 

Unit board in practice

I'm into the second unit now and I've been adapting the unit board along the way to make it meaningful and engage the students in the unit's development.

Here are some things that are working:

Creating the board

Student examples of the Approaches to Learning

The students are responsible for creating the flags for the: transdisciplinary theme, unit title, lines of inquiry, teacher questions, and approaches to learning. They explain them to the class and they match the lines of inquiry to the teacher questions.  When we're reviewing what we're learning, the student responsible for creating the flag explains it. This responsibility has given them more ownership in the unit. As it is the second unit, they are beginning to take it as a habit now.

Drafts of Central Ideas, Lines of Inquiry and Teacher Questions

Writing the Central Idea

In Unit 1,  Students wrote their drafts of the central idea on post it notes.They revised each draft once, thus three separate post it notes. By the end of the unit they were able to coordinate their individual central idea drafts to write one clear idea of what we had studied in our unit.
The classes final central idea was "We can experiment with microorganisms, living or by preventing, to prepare food. It was much clearer than the original: People can use a variety of methods to preserve food.

 The post it notes worked well, but they kept falling off of the cloud.
In unit two I modified it so that each student has a star hanging from the cloud. Now they can add revise the stars and add more, seeing how their understanding of the central idea has grown over the course of the unit. I also like the visual metaphor that their drafts are as important as stars.
 

Students questions. 

I have modified how and when I query for student questions. I have pushed it back into week 2-3 of the unit, so that they have time to gain some background knowledge to ask deep questions. This has been paying off for me. In the past I gained shallow questions like how many kinds of government are there? Who makes governments? This year I received deeper questions like are there any countries without a government? How do governments help people in war? What were the first forms of government?

I have been using thinking routines to develop their questioning skills. We have used the Think Puzzle Explore for the first two units. In the first unit we completed it as a class. In the second unit they completed it in pairs.

The Unit Book

Our unit 1 pages for the unit book

During the summative assessment for unit 1 students took the unit board apart and turned it into a book. Last year students used the unit board book when they were stuck creating their lines of inquiry or choosing Approaches to Learning when they developed their own unit plan for the exhibition.

 

 

 

 

Thing that I've changed

Key Concepts Dice

I have worked with the students to create Key Concepts dice. The students analyze what they know about the key concept and use that to develop 5 questions that we write on 5 sides of the die. When we're having conversations we throw the dice to keep the conversation going.

Students work

Student work for tuning in and finding out

I was reading a post on unit boards on a facebook group and a friend posted about a lack of student work on unit boards. It had me looking at my unit board and realizing that unit examples were done in my hand. This was in part because most of our work was done in laboratory and I couldn't exactly put our pickles or jerky on the board ;) Their lab notes and research were written in their notebooks.
But I took her comment to heart.
In this unit I have taken care to develop activities that show their learning and can be posted on the board to track our progress in the inquiry cycle.

Our Monarchs wrote a constitution for our government unit.