Thanks to everyone for their active participation in today’s conferences. It was a pleasure to talk with you about your Inquiry Project paper, your thoughts on the Inquiry Project process, and to address some of your questions regarding the upcoming long prac.
We’ll spend our class time on Wednesday, 7 March 2012 going over some important prepatory information for the long prac.
– Lawrence
Thank you to all of today’s presenters. I look forward to seeing what’s on offer in Wednesday’s session.
Speaking of Wednesday, here’s the Inquiry Project elements that are to be emailed to your FA on or before that day:
Speaking of inquiry, check out how Will Ferrell inquires into the effective use of cowbells in this classic SNL clip:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRzds1HHkas[/youtube]
– Lawrence
The I.P. Presentation Component
Shep and I spent some time in today’s session reminding you of what’s expected for the Multimedia Presentation Aspect of this task. In essence, there are two key parts to it:
Please see last week’s blog entry – Round 2 of the Inquiry Project Small Group Meetings: Update for Monday, 6 February 2012 – for all the details on these two items in addition to information on how we’ll structure the concurrent presentations.
The I.P. Written Component Feedback
Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful feedback on the writing of your group mates. Please remember that the final draft of your piece is due to your FA on Wednesday, 22 February 2012 in a hard copy or via email.
That’s all for today.
– Lawrence
Thanks again to all those who attended this morning’s inquiry project check-in meetings.
The rough draft of your Inquiry Project 1500-word paper will be discussed in a small group meeting on Monday, 13 Feb. In our session on Monday, 6 Feb, we’ll make arrangements so the other members of your group have time to read your piece and prepare some feedback for you to discuss while face-to-face on the 13th.
Also, we’ll set aside a portion of our meeting on Monday, 6 Feb to talk about what the 10-minute multi-media presentation on your project and the one-page synthesis might look like.
Cheers,
– Lawrence
Artifact Reflection Peer Assessment
We set some time aside at the start of today’s session for peer feedback on the Artifact Reflection you had posted on your ePortfolio. The rubric we used to structure the feedback is below. This is likely very similar to the tool that your EDUC 480 instructor will use to assess your ePortfolio this summer:
Please email the link to your revised Artifact Reflection Task on your ePortfolio to your FA by the end of Wednesday, 25 January 2012.
Inquiry Project Conference Setup
I reviewed the plan for the Inquiry Project Conferences that will occur over the next three Mondays. Please make note of your meeting time and location, as shown in the image below, and come to this meeting with a one-pager answering the question:
This one-pager will provide the stimulus for the conversation about your topic and task that will take place during our meeting.
Management Revisited
Dave and I were curious to hear about some of the successes that you had with management on prac. To that end, we did the following:
I showed a clip from the HBO crime / drama series The Wire of a fired police officer / beginning teacher delivering his first lesson, and I asked you to look for what worked and what didn’t in his management:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mnbs4V426U[/youtube]
After giving you some time to think about what worked for you on the 2-Week Prac with respect to classroom management, we convened a Panel of Proficiency. On the panel were TCs who had a management success story to share. After the sharing, we had an open discussion on several management topics
Farewell to Dave
Seeing as today was Dave’s last day in class as an instructor / FA, I took a bit of time to:
We can all look forward to working with Shep Alexander for the remainder of EDUC 310/316 and during the long practicum. Welcome (back), Shep!
– Lawrence
Thanks to everyone who attended today’s brief individual meetings regarding your inquiry questions. We’ll spend some time in Wednesday’s class laying out the shape of our upcoming small group sessions.
– Lawrence
Today’s lesson had two parts. I’ll break it all down below:
Analyzing the Inquiry Project Criteria
We used the Jigsaw strategy to consider the 4 criteria – taken from the IP Rubric – on which the written component of your IP will be assessed. Here’s the handout with the rubric:
Refining Your Inquiry Question
Using the exercises in the handout below:
you took some time to thoughtfully consider your inquiry question and craft it into a final, “I’m going to have a go with this question” draft.
5-Minute Inquiry Project Question Mini-Conferences
Dave and I want to check for understanding before you get started on your researching and writing journey so, to that end, we will be holding short conferences to review and sign off on your questions and action plan. These meetings will take place instead of our regularly scheduled class. Here are the schedules for those meetings:
Dave’s Schedule
Lawrence’s Schedule
For this meeting you MUST bring a final draft of your Inquiry Project One-Pager. That’s the same document you posted on Vista before the Christmas Break. The file is below for easy reference:
That’s all for today.
Stay warm,
– Lawrence
Inquiry One-Pager
We’ve spent a lot of time this term considering the nature of inquiry and the shape of powerful inquiry questions. At long last the time has come for you to make a tentative commitment to a question and jot down some ideas about it. The vehicle for this exercise is the Inquiry Project One-Pager. Here’s the handout:
Once you’ve completed the four questions on this sheet, please cut your writing and paste it into a post on the Initial Inquiry Questions section of our EDUC 310 VISTA site.
Dave and I realize that your question will evolve over time – most likely in response to your experiences on your 2-week prac. That said we’re looking for a general sense of the direction your inquiry might take at this stage in the game. Your one-pager is to be posted on EDUC 310 VISTA site by Wednesday, 30 November 2011.
Administriiva
Unit Planning
After showing you the UBD unit planning template (also in the Get Yer Forms! post below) and reminding you that your draft unit plan and full lesson plans for the first two lessons must be submitted by email to your SA and FA by Monday, 5 December 2011, I spent some time presenting a slideshow on assessment. Here’s that PPT slideshow:
And here’s the video clip I showed to wrap my presentation that speaks to the anonymity of standardized testing:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NfuniN0Sdg[/youtube]
See you on Monday.
– LH
Stop. Start. Continue. Results
Dave presented the results from our formative assessment and outlined our thoughts on them. You can find all of the ideas in each column here:
Teacher Inquiry is…
We asked you to consider the essential and non-essential elements of teacher inquiry using the article your Reading #3 article as a stimulus for your thinking.
The Coyote Project
In an effort to show you how an inquiry process might play out, I read The Coyote Project and asked you to use the strategy Thinking Bubbles as a during-reading activity. TB is a strategy I first discovered while reading Brownlie & Close’s Beyond Chalk & Talk. Beyond Chalk & Talk It’s a great book full of hands-on and minds-on collaborative learning strategies.
Susan Close describes the TB strategy this way:
“With this tool learners generate what they think a character is picturing, sensing, thinking, saying, feeling and noticing in thinking bubbles – revealing cartoon-like representations.”
Post-reading I asked you to add any other ideas to our list of essential characteristics. In the end, here’s what our list looked like (Thanks to Jerin for the photo – LH):
Upcoming Due Dates
That’s all for today.
– LH
As promised, here are the 3-2-1 synthesis papers for everyone’s inquiry project. Please contact the author for more information on their paper or topic:
– Lawrence