Unit 4: Linking Curricular Goals to Inquiry

From this week’s discussions and readings, I have come to a better understanding of concepts vs. facts and investable vs. non-investable questions.  I see how facts and concepts are related and how I can create investable questions from facts to help students master concepts.  In class we focus on helping students discover facts about the world around them.  In order to do that we need to plan and help them create investable questions that can be acted on now.  Once students are able to connect facts to their lives they can then start to explore and understand concepts that connect with those facts, all of this is the process of learning.  Taking two pieces of information and forming them into one new concept.

I have had many successes and a few set backs applying these ideas in my teaching this week.  I am always thinking how can I use questioning to help my students arrive at the conclusion I want rather than just tell them the answer.  I feel like my students are more active when I put the responsibility and ownership in their court.  They are doing the work and I am coaching them.  I try to lead with their strengths and strengthen their weaknesses.  I was using these strategies in reading and understanding characters this week.  I taught students to use clues from the text and text features to gather information about the character.  Then, I tried to have them use inferences to make statements about who the characters are, what their relationships are like, what they are thinking and what they are feeling.  The students were able to use a graphic organizer to record their findings.

Also, this week we did instructional rounds for two days in our building.  We were able to visit four classrooms and record our observations just as we did with the video on the science teacher.  My focus was on student accountability.  From my observations and interviews with the students I was able to arrive at the conclusion that student accountability goes hand in hand with student ownership of their learning.  Students take ownerships when they are able to connect with the content and formulate their own questions.  In order for students to connect with the content they must understand why it is important to them in their lives.  That’s why formulating real world investable questions and investigations are so important to student learning.  Through this week’s readings, I am now better able to break down big ideas from the curriculum goals into facts and formulate meaningful, investable questions to guide my students as they investigate the answers and create new investable questions.