Teaching as Inquiry

We had our second session of learning about teaching as inquiry with Tamara Bell from Core Education today. My takeaway from this is that when starting an inquiry I should think about the specific students in my class, and focus on 1, or 2, or 3 students who have specific needs. This makes sure that my teaching will impact on those students. Students could be selected for remedial or extension work. 

I also loved the questions on how to integrate e-learning tools (note: replace [my target student] with specific student/s names)

• How can I  use a wiki and digital recording apps to support individualised learning for[my target student]?
• How can I improve [my target student]’s writing- using sentence structure and sequencing through Storybird?
• What instructional strategies and e-tools can I use when teaching narrative writing that will  have a positive impact on [my target students]' writing?
• How can I use  a class blog regularly to improve writing for [my target student] and share learning with others (e.g. http://kidblog.org/home/ or http://blogger.com)?
• How can I use Google Docs to encourage collaboration in my class to improve writing?
• I want to find out how I can use eLearning tools (web 2.0) to support [my target students] to communicate their experiences, ideas and information creatively
• How can I use e-tools to improve [my target student]'s reading fluency?  (e.g. Vocaroo)

One of the challenges will be how can I capture the student's voices effectively? Tamara suggested that when I collect student voice information, I ask those kids I want to know what's going on for, not necessarily the whole school. Questions could include:

• What do you like about maths?
• Which way of doing maths do you like the most? (e.g. iPads, written work, using materials, etc.)
• What do you struggle with in maths?

You could collect this data by videoing children's responses.