CoL Meeting Term 2 - Focusing Inquiry and Teaching Inquiry

We had our CoL meeting after school today. This is the second one this term and our focus in small groups, was on the following things :-

Learn (Focusing Inquiry)

Share a brief reflection in response to your Focusing Inquiry

• What information, strategies, tools did you use to determine what your students have already learned and what they need to learn next? (3min)

As you share reference your blog and highlight how you have organised your evidence so that it is visible and accessible to your colleagues.

Create (Teaching Inquiry)

• Based on this evidence what are you planning to do differently as a teacher? What might you need help with? (3min)

For the first part, my answer included my work with the seniors on their isometric skills for Manaiakalani Class OnAir.

After we had done this work, I sent the students a Google Form to get their feedback about how it went. In depth feedback about this here.

So my strategies were to get the students to analyse what they had done and what they thought they had got out of it as an activity. The tools I used was a Google Form and talking face to face with the students.

I talked about how not all the feedback I got from the students was good or positive but we got a positive outcome from it. "Bad feedback is good feedback".

For the second part of the feedback, I talked about my creation of the self assessment parts of the SOLO Taxonomy structured activities that I have been making recently. I have made these but not used them with the students yet. Blog post here and SOLO resources here. I feel that this is a good way to go as the focus is not on a particular activity or project or NCEA standard with these self assessment grids, but on the depth of thinking that the students have done.

The part that I am going to aim for help with is to ask to go and visit the classrooms of a couple of intermediate school teachers. These guys have been using self assessment as part of their teaching so I want to go and see how they do it and discuss with them about the difference it makes.

It was a really good session listening to everyone else in the group talk about their inquiries and what they have been doing. You get wrapped up in your own classroom and it is extremely interesting listening to other teachers talk about what they do and how they do it.