On 22 September I attended a great webinar delivered by Claire Steele and Sarah Smith from ELTONIX. I found their presentation Creative ideas for your CPD very inspiring and useful, so I am sharing my notes.
As teachers, we might tend to take decisions too quickly and without exploring the situation further. As a result, this can involve assumptions which may be based on signs and intuition instead of reasons why this situation is happening (Smith & Rebolledo, 2018: 20).
PLAN TO EXPLORE
Thus, teachers are encouraged to plan questions to observe and explore an identified puzzling situation. The speakers suggested changing the how to why. For example, How do I get my students to like writing? --> Why don’t my students want to engage with writing?
There are three ways to create exploratory questions (Smith & Rebolledo, 2018).
Exploring my perceptions
What do I think/feel about…?
Why do I think … happens?
Exploring others’ perceptions
What do my students think/feel about…?
What do my colleagues think of…?
Exploring behaviour
What do I do/say when … occurs?
What do my students do/say when … occurs?
Smith & Rebolledo (2018: 37) highlight that exploratory questions focus on exploring a situation in order to understand it better, rather than on taking action to change it immediately.
So, for example, if we focus on student engagement in writing lessons (Why don’t my students want to engage with writing?), these are the questions that teachers could explore:
What do I think is a successful and engaging writing lesson? (my perceptions)
What do my students think of writing lessons? (others’ perceptions)
At what stage of the lesson do my students lose interest? (behaviour)
EXPLORE
What can be done to gather information to try to answer the exploratory questions?
Suggested activities for teachers
Look at the materials you’ve used in class recently. Which ones would you put in your ‘outbox’ (never again) and which in your ‘inbox’ (this is a keeper)?
Look back at your lesson procedure. Take some colour pencils. What colours come to mind for each stage of the lesson? Why? What do you associate each colour with?
Imagine a genie appears to you and grants you 3 wishes. What would they be for your classroom?
Suggested activities for students
Ask students to write a short text message to an absent student describing what happened in the lesson and how they felt about it and why
Younger students could draw a picture of their favourite part of the lesson on the front of a postcard (and write a short description on the back)
At the end of the lesson, give students 5 minutes to think about the lesson and provide them with the sentence stem “why did you…?”. Give them time to come up with questions about your lesson that you can answer. Do the same for the students and ask them e.g. why did you all start talking during the writing stage?
ACT
Based on your analysis and interpretation of the findings, you need to decide whether some kind of new ‘action’ is now needed.
Claire and Sarah recommended:
changing one thing at a time,
ensuring that the action is specific to the group of learners you've explored with,
ensuring that the action you implement addresses the students' perspectives and needs.
REFLECT
Finally, both teachers and students are encouraged to reflect on the success of the action/change.
Comments