Immersion

Shotover Belief Statement for the value Curiosity

An inquisitive, curious attitude fuels the quest for learning

Professional Reading:

• Kath Murdoch page 56-57 ‘The Power of Inquiry’
• Shotover BPP (beliefs, principles and practices) on curiosity

After reading Kath Murdoch + the Shotover BPP on curiosity think about what aspect of this week’s teaching and learning was just immersion? Which aspects of this week’s teaching and learning were moving into connecting, creating and communicating?

At Shotover Primary School we call our inquiry learning process 'The Learning Model'.  Part of our Learning Model is immersion - this is to immerse the students in a concept... to 'hook' them in and create 'curiosity' in learning, which is on of our 5 learning values.  Kath Murdoch calls student curiosity 'the grease that helps turn the wheels of learning'.  She states that we want our learners to be questioners... 'to be curious, risk taking, wondering learners who are thirsty to find out, critique and explore the world.' 

Initially I thought that the define map I create with a whanau group in Hays on the concept of movement on Monday was just activating prior knowledge (PK).  Yet on reflection after reading our BPP and the extract from Kath Murdoch the learners PK for the define map initiated the most exciting questions, wonderings and discussions about our movement concept (see below for a more detailed account of our discussions.)  

On Wednesday I also started working on the Otago Mothnet Project with a group of 16 students from Hays.  This community based project is part of our movement concept.  The students are researching which moths live where in Otago and how our lights affect moths.  

So what was immersion for the Otago Mothnet Project?  Simply just introducing the project to the students!  Using the the poster advertising the project and the information from the scientist leading the community project (Barbara Anderson) I explained that not much research has been completed on NZ moths, that we would collecting and researching which moths live where in Otago and how our lights affect moths,  that other schools would be collaborating with us on the project, that we'll get to work with scientists and become entomologists ourselves, and that we will create an exhibition at school to communicate our research to others.  Also that our research would form part of a new exhibition on moths at Orokonui Ecosanctuary.  It took about 10-15 minutes!  It certainly generated lots of curiosity questions from the students!

Since then we have moved on to the 'connect' phase of our learning model.  I've been teaching students how to take notes (keywords) from youtube clips, websites and books.  We've also been learning how to connect our ideas and learning how to use a compare and contrast map, looking at the similarities and differences between butterflies and moths and explaining why they have differences! It's very exciting stuff!

ACTIVATING PRIOR KNOWLEDGE + DEFINE MAP ON MOVEMENT SESSION

The focus of this session was to:

• activate students’ prior knowledge
• capture student voice (their wonderings, curiosities, interests etc.)
• start to develop an understanding of SOLO levels
• model / scaffold how to use a define map
• model / scaffold how to create a first definition

First we unpacked the different levels of SOLO Taxonomy - and used the hand signals to help concrete the different depths/levels of thinking used in SOLO. We identified that we were going to focus on multistructural thinking and relational thinking. We used talk buddies to share our ideas, then share with the whole group and then we created a define map. Students wrote their ideas about movement on the post its. One idea on one post it. We had some amazing discussions about what is movement and what movement isn’t, with lots of discussion around gravity, the earth spinning, things that are alive or were once alive. We looked at what we had put in the non-relevant part of our map - after much group discussion the students decided all of their ideas were movement and it was hard to put anything into the non-relevant part of the map. After morning tea we started to craft our first definition. We did this collaboratively as one group - we aimed to include all of our ideas from our define map. We discussed that the define map was multistructural thinking (listing many ideas) and that our definition was relational thinking as we were starting explain our ideas / thinking using the word ‘because’. Lots of wonderings or curiosity questions arose up so we recorded these ideas too. 

Possible next steps:

• take one of the ideas from our collaborative definition to explore further and deeper (perhaps those linked to Health + P.E as that is this terms focus)
• create define map collaboratively in pairs 
• create a definition collaboratively in pairs 
• unpack how to come with a wondering or curiosity statement or question 
• students to keep evidence of their initial ideas in a learning book or Google Doc e.g. photograph of the group define map, stick in their post-it notes, stick in a copy of their collaborative group definition