Deep Learning, New Pedagogies, Inquiry, 5C’s
The Learning Intention of this afternoons professional learning session is to:
consolidate the terms of 5C’s, New Pedagogies, Deep Learning and Inquiry into a something practical that we all can use, understand and explain.
Often in school we get caught up with the terminology involved in our day to day affairs hopefully after today’s session we will have a good understanding of all the terms in the title of this post and have some strategies to help give our inquiry units deep learning outcomes.
There is a too much research to mention in one blog post on the benefits of a student centered and Inquiry Based approach to learning. Well renowned educators such as Kathy Walker, Kath Murdoch, John Hattie, Michael Fullan and Jeni Wilson are just some of the names who have influenced some of the professional learning that we have received, ultimately all of these educators share the view that igniting passion in people, giving them choice and allowing them with guidance to follow their interests is the key of Deep Learning and learning how to learn which is as fundamental skill as any we need to be teaching our kids.
I am going to start with the probably an obvious video (now ten years old!)…Ken Robinson’s ‘Do School’s kill creativity’ has become a catalyst for a massive wave of transformation.If people haven’t seen this video by Sir Ken Robinson then we highly recommend watching it. He talks about his hopes for education and gives subtle hints of what schools (and systems) could be doing differently.
Sugatra Mitra: Build a school in the cloud
Arvind Gupta- Turning trash into toys for learning
Charles Leadbetter- Education innovation in the slums
Angela Duckworth-The key to success? Grit.
Let’s raise kids to be entrepeneurs
Denmark’s Forest Kindergartens
The happy secret to better work
The Power of Play- Charlie Hoen
The two (american) videos below are less about Inquiry but clearly demonstrate how believing in every child, having high expectations and teaching with love can inspire change. I like them so I thought I would include them!
Linda Cliatt Wayman-How to fix a broken school
Jeffrey Canda-Our failing schools, enough is enough
Some of you might prefer to read so here is a tiny sample of the thousands that are out there on Deep Learning and Inquiry Based Learning…
Edutopia-Creating a culture of inquiry– At the end of this article there is a link to skip to the next related article. So really following this you have a whole series of articles regarding inquiry based learning.
Learning is the work-Michael Fullan
Intentional Alignment of Assessment Standards
What is Inquiry Learning-Kath Murdoch
More stuff from Kath Murdoch
It is easy to see from the examples above that there is much evidence to suggest that we can be taking the inquiry approach further. One immediate action we can take is to be talking with out students about the deep learning capabilities and use Inquiry as a way of explicitly referring to the characteristics we want to build in our students everyday. While each characteristic could be elaborated extensively, we have tried to simplify measuring our students on these capabilities by condensing them into a single page rubric. These rubrics will become a part of our Inquiry Assessment. Check it out below…
What changes would you suggest? Is it simple enough? Is too simple? Can the students follow?
The next piece of work is to have a look at the Learning Design Protocol. Don’t worry, while it does sound technical it basically is just a series of question that we can ask ourselves when we are designing Learning tasks for students. In Year level teams we are going to have a look at the questions on this list and decide on some areas that we could focus on.
There are more resources that we have either used today or for those who would like to dig deeper into the 5C’s and the NPDL project.