Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Questions about Inquiry during Lockdown

  • How another lockdown period may impact the learners in your focus group?
  • Will you need to make any changes to your Inquiry?
  • How might your intervention look different if you continue through this period?
  • Do any of your intervention plans work via distance learning?
  • Is there any information about implementation of your changed practices/intervention you could collect during this time?


This lockdown has definitely affected my learners. It feels so different this time. I am not seeing many of them come online for our scheduled meets.
I am working with the students who come online to complete the work that was started before the lockdown started, in terms of documents in their drive. I had already started making help videos to go with all of this online work so this effort has been stepped up to try and help the students in between seeing me on meets and to try and help those students who I am not seeing. I am not sure many of those students who I am not seeing are doing the work though, as their documents are not changing when I check them, I can only help where I can though, so I have been trying to convince myself to stop stressing over things I have no control over.

Example of where I have been making support videos - this has definitely expanded beyond my original inquiry group of Y11 and Y12 students.
What I have also been looking at is how my Y11 and Y12 students can pick up extra credits for the work they are managing to complete. There are Generic Technology standards at NCEA 1 and 2 that are about writing a design brief. For my Year 12 students, this was quite a smooth one to slide into as they had done most of what they needed for the standards they were already entered into, so it was just a case of some specially targeted extras to make everything line up. Link to work here. I added this on the end of what they had already completed for their design brief. Two of my students have taken me up on this and have completed this extra work and have got the 4 extra credits as of writing this blog post. With my Y11 class, they had done a very basic design brief so this would mean a fair chunk of extra work to bulk it out for the new standard. I offered it to them and one of them has said yes so far, which is great. I am adding their extra support here. I have only just started this with them, so all the work is not there yet.

The multi modal structure that I was trying to build in this year has become especially important as trying to explain things to the students over a Google Meet is not always the easiest way to learn something new.
An example of this is with my Year 12 group who have to move on and learn about cross sectional drawing as part of their design development work. I had set myself up to be able to draw online with them and organised with Mr Dunn to have some drawing equipment sent out to their homes. - blog post here.  I have also had to come up with different ways for them to visualise what a cross section would look like. Working with Lego was one way - blog post here and putting together a multi model page on the class site is anther way - link to page on class site here. This gives them hands on examples that they can manipulate and move around, questions to answer and get instant feedback, video to watch and information to read. 

The great thing about all of this preparation work that I have been doing during this lockdown time is that non of it is wasted. It is all good stuff to be available to the students at any time. It has also cemented in my head how important my class site is as the place to go for everything so it needs to be as supportive as I can make it. Using the site in tandem with shared evidence spreadsheets and calendars has been my main structure.

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