Aliyah
Born Dec. 8
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Structured Inquiry
In the structured inquiry lesson this week, time proved to be the biggest challenge. We had the Iowa Assessments that took up a majority of the week. We implemented the lesson on Friday before our Valentine's party, but ran out of time to properly wrap up and assess the lesson. We will continue the lesson on Monday and I hope to get some more participation on the class wiki to check for understanding. The assessment was to create a plan to stay heart healthy (we studied the impacts of narrowing veins). The optional posts on the wiki (over the weekend: we will go to the lab next week) were vague and did not show students have met the learning objective. It became evident they need a rubric to help guide their explanations. Our class wiki can be found at: saunderswilson.pbworks.com. The link directly to student conversations on the lesson can be found at: http://saunderswilson.pbworks.com/w/page/50841526/HEART%20HEALTH%20PLANS
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Reese, what grade do you teach? I loved the wiki. I had to smile with the brevity of their posts. So very typical of my students as well. I am really interested in knowing what your lab is. I teach the human body and am always looking for inquiry activities that can be done in class.
ReplyDeleteHi Reese!
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how much our students seem alike in that they know how to give the "right" answer, the surface answer, but getting them to dig deeper is like pulling teeth. My student samples are much the same. The only way I can get to the meat of what it is I am actually looking for is by long, patient Socratic questioning, and I don't have videotaping capability so you would never get to see my students reach their "aha!" moments. What can you do.
It seems to be a universal teacher lament, the kids can't write, despite how much time and effort we lavish on teaching them writing skills. You would think that the rise of social networking/blogging would bring writing back, but it seems that it has not. I imagine when text to speech software is finally truly perfected and widespread the "art" of keyboarding will finally be lost, and writing will go the way of the buggy whip.
Eileen,
ReplyDeleteI love your comment on questioning them to death!! They often know the answer, but it takes me to pull it out of them. I haven't figured out if it's that they don't know how to answer, or if they just don't want to put in the effort to answer.
With my kids, for sure one of the factors that is playing in is the fear of looking smart.
ReplyDelete"I'm not a NERD! She just FORCED me to look smart in front of everyone!"
I'm sure you can hear me groaning from here.
Eileen