Skip to main content

Scott McLeod: Challenge 2-Curiosity: January 29, 2018

This week, I decided to go to my second blog choice for the semester as "Cult of Pedagogy" took a break for the week.  I will be summarizing Scott McLeod's most recent blog on challenge- based leadership.  This blog post really made me sit back and think about the different ways that my school challenges students and sparks their curiosity.

The blog began by a quote from Sir Ken Robinson, "Young children have a ready appetite to explore whatever draws their interest.  When their curiosity is engaged, they will learn for themselves, from each other, and from any source they can lay their hands on."  This quote really stood out to me and made me reflect upon the eagerness that students have to learn something new and how our job as educators is to ensure that we are consistently keeping that curiosity and eagerness alive.  It really made me think, "Do I keep this alive in my students each day?" which is exactly where Scott went next. 

Scott then quoted research that supported that when students begin to develop their own questions about learning their learning experiences deepen. The research also stated that unfortunately, students are rarely taught how to develop questions.  Further research by Postman and Weingartner stated that students are mostly spending their time in school remembering what is being taught to them and that there are few cases when students participate in inquiry or asking questions.  This made me reflect on my own classroom as I know that I should incorporate more student lead inquiry, but there are times where my students are asked to remember a specific math strategy or a grammar rule; am I hindering their ability to develop the sacred skill of asking questions to determine a set of knowledge for themselves?

The end of the article posed the question, "What could you do as a school leader to hack at some new possibilities for curiosity- and inquiry-driven student learning?" This is something that I am going to make a focal point in my teaching, especially with trying to incorporate technology.  I need to find ways to spark student curiosity and allow them to participate in inquiry. What are ways that any of you have used technology for inquiry-driven learning or to spark student curiosity?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jennifer Gonzalez- Cult of Pedagogy: Updating Your Classroom Design- March 27, 2018

Recently, Jennifer Gonzalez created a blog post about upgrading your classroom design.  We often see classrooms that look cozy and modern, allowing students to collaborate and feel at home, yet many teachers believe that it is impossible to make their own classroom this way within budget constraints and small spaces.  Jennifer interviewed Bob Dillon to gather 12 things that teachers can do to make their classrooms more student friendly and a better place for learning. 1) Ask students throughout the year "What in this room supports your learning and what gets in the way?" 2) Take things out: if you remove items and you don't miss them then you don't need them in your classroom. 3) Mix up Student Seating: try different arrangements or allow students choice in where they sit. 4) Take notice of the perimeter: Are the walls distracting or do they add to learning? Do certain posters need taken down? 5) Reduce or Eliminate Teacher Workspace: Allow students more...
1 comment
Read more

My Technology Use: February 4, 2018: Smart Notebook

I often use Smart Notebook in my classroom, but I will be the first to admit it is often used to post an agenda or as an extra whiteboard in the classroom to call students up to work out problems.  My students have always loved getting to write on the Smart Board.  This week, I needed to teach elapsed time and to be honest, I was really struggling with introducing it.  I wanted an interactive lesson, which kept seeming to be impossible as our school only had a total of 10 mini clocks for the students to work with in a hands-on manner at their desks.  I remembered Smart Notebook and was able to create a lesson using it that I was really proud of and my students loved! I searched for a clock and found one under "interactive and multimedia."  This clock allowed us to move the minute and hour hand to review how to use a clock to tell time.  I was then able to put two clocks side by side and call on students to set each clock to a different time, so that we cou...
1 comment
Read more

My Technology Use: February 19, 2018: Conversion Examples

This week, I didn't try anything fancy in my classroom with technology, but instead had a spur of the moment opportunity to utilize technology to further my students' understanding.  We are working on converting units of measure.  It is my first year teaching fourth grade math, and when asking a coworker (who taught math previously in fourth grade) what background knowledge students usually come with as far as measurement goes, she said in the past they had a basic idea of what each unit of measure was.  This year, of course, was not the case at all.  My students picked up on feet and inches, but kilograms, grams, meters, millimeters, etc. were all very foreign words to them.  I quickly realized that there was no discussion that was going to help them understand, so I turned to technology for help. We went through each unit of measure individually and because it was spur of the moment, I only thought to Google each unit of measure and show real-life examples of...
1 comment
Read more