Inquiry Question 3

Explain why you judge this to be the most important and catalytic issue of learning for this group of learners this year (In chemistry, a catalytic substance one  which increases the speed of a chemical reaction).

The students need to get ready for their presentations which will happen at regular intervals throughout the year. Their work needs to be ready to be put on show and their analysis needs to be done so they can talk about it. I am hoping that this will give them the impetus to keep their work up to date as they all need to hit deadlines throughout the year to enable this to happen.
As they are preparing their analysis to present to the rest of the class they know that they are going to have an instant audience, not just themselves and the teacher. They will be comparing themselves to the rest of the class during this process and they can draw ideas and inspiration from each other as they go. They are going to support each other with questions face to face that need to be answered straight away, not having the luxury of being online and time available to think. The act of questioning each other is also higher level, extended abstract thinking too as they have to understand what is being presented and apply to to their own thinking in order to ask questions that are meaningful and pull out more detail.