The power of partnerships...

Sorry to bombard you with another long winded regale of my experience on this journey. So much has been happening that it's nearly impossible to keep up.
On Monday our two senior classes spent a full day at the Mendel Art Gallery. On a whole, it was a pretty amazing day. The students spent time rotating through the gallery learning about message and content, and then into the studio to create. They learned a few new art techniques, and clearly understood that art is about sending a message. It's pretty amazing and cool if you stop to think about it. Art can engage us and speak a powerful message without using a single word. We viewed Steeling the Gaze: Portraits by Aboriginal Artists.

These portraits were full of symbolism and messages. Some of the messages were more disturbing than others as they tackled stereotypes of the First Nations and Metis culture. Words like gang member and alcoholic subtly placed on t-shirts in beautiful photos gave way to the harsh reality of what comes to mind for many when they think of First Nations people. The beauty of children and their innocence was apparent when many of them said they didn't "get it." They didn't get it because they hadn't heard some of these stereotypes, not because they lacked the understanding of a stereotype. Wouldn't it be amazing if in the future these stereotypes became something of the past and most of our youth grow up and never learn these misconceptions and generalizations?

There was so much information to mine out of these photos that I think I'll have to follow up with some of the on-line links offered through the Mendel. The gallery is huge and the acoustics aren't great for teaching and discussing, and that leaves me with a feeling like our look at this art isn't quite over yet. Our tour guide was amazingly kind, gentle, and encouraging of all the students, as she led them through the gallery and art activities. Here are some examples of the graffiti art she had them do.

The goal was to create a positive "I am" statement in graffiti style on black paper with pastel. They turned out wonderful. The Mendel Art Gallery sponsored a portion of their time with us, which is another amazing gift and opportunity for our students.

The next day our students spent the afternoon with two First Nations guests, Alexander Kennedy and Josephine Kennedy. They spoke to our students about growing up on reserve. Alex spoke of spiritual beliefs, attending day school, and wisdom passed down from his grandfather. He tied this all together at the end by explaining the Idle No More movement. Josephine spoke to us about her experiences in residential school. Her stories were sad and haunting, but also hope filled. She explained how the residential school experience left many First Nations people with difficulty loving and parenting and masking pain with alcohol. She spoke to our students for an hour and a half, and I don't want to minimize her amazing presentation, but I also want to be sensitive about broadcasting her story online. The students connected with these two individuals and had many poignant questions to ask them. One of my students told me that meeting them made it clear how difficult residential schools were. I wish I had copied down a direct quote, but she said something along the lines of, "She is here all these years later speaking to us about her experience, and you can tell from her voice, her body, and her face that this is painful and her heart still hurts." I heard several students say that meeting these two people helped them to understand the harm done by our government.
So now all the learning around treaty, the Indian Act, and residential schools is not so abstract. It also became clear to the students that while this happened before they were born, it didn't happen too long ago, and the impact is still evident today.
I have to acknowledge that our funding for this project comes from the Saskatchewan Arts Board through a TreatySmarts grant. We also need to acknowledge our partnership with the Mendel Art Gallery, The Saskatoon Tribal Council and the Office of the Treaty Commissioner. These important partnerships and funding help us to create rich learning environments where students have a deep understanding.

Front-end loading

A misconception about inquiry based learning is that children have complete control over what they will learn. It may conjure images in your mind of students using computers to delve deeper into whatever they are interested in. That's not totally true. Inquiry does allow students the freedom to learn about an aspect they are more interested in, but this learning is guided and supported by the teacher. There is still a place for direct instruction throughout an inquiry project. I sort of think of it as a feedback loop. When you have an over arching question, you may need several mini-questions to explore that question, especially when you work with a cross-curricular thematic approach. Propose the question, front-end load some of the more interesting material, have students question and wonder, represent learning, use formative assessment to determine how students are taking in the new content, and teach again as needed. There are times when students are teaching each other. There are times where you are directly giving them information. There are also many opportunities for you to steer the learning through exploration. It is a really exciting process. For me, every unit develops as I go. I know where I want to end up, the road map changes and adjusts as the project gets underway. I adjust the road as I determine where the projects needs to go to get to our outcome. To me, this is the best part of teaching. This allows me to have autonomy as a teacher, and to use my professional judgement and creativity to respond to the students and their needs. (I do need to say here that this is my interpretation to this point on my journey. It will be interesting to see if I agree with myself a year from now or two years from now.)

For the past four or five weeks, my students have done a lot of exploration though art around identity, stereotypes, and culture. Something I had not mentioned was that during this entire time, I was supporting student learning around First Nations, Inuit, and Metis history as set by our provincial curriculum. For two one-hour sessions per week, my students received explicit instruction around treaties: what was promised and what promises were kept. They also received direct instruction around the Indian Act and residential schools. Students learned about assimilation and genocide - all ugly parts of our history that many Canadians have forgotten or were never taught in the first place. This instruction was done by our ELO Catalyst teacher, Bev Schell. To get this information to the students in a quick and logical manner, Bev used powerpoints, and handouts. The handouts were largely used to track student thoughts, questions, and learning around the content. Often, I modeled my own mind-mapping for the students on the board. Some students directly copied my thoughts, and points, other students used the own. I didn't mind if the students copied my work. I think this is part of the gradual release of responsibility: some students still need my support with tracking their thinking.

We now have the framework of "knowledge" mostly completed. To understand the complex issues facing First Nations and Metis people, students needed this background information. With my background in Native Studies, I have to say that even I was able to learn new information from Bev. From the information that she passed onto us, we were left with big wonders and questions. What if the land that was promised had been given? Would First Nations people have been able to farm and become self sustaining? If the Indian Act hadn't been created to assimilate First Nations people into the dominant culture, would there be so much poverty and alcoholism? These are deep questions that my students are now wondering.

For the last two weeks my students have been exploring poverty. We have been using resources at Saskatoon Poverty Reduction . This is a great website that has videos and educational tools that can help put a face to poverty and help the general public to have a better understanding of the challenges faced by the working poor and individuals living in poverty. I had my students view these three videos:

This video is about a working poor family from the inner city of Saskatoon.

This video follows the coach of the Saskatoon Blades hockey team as he participates in a Saskatoon Food Bank Challenge. The most powerful part of the learning in this video, for me, was when he said that if he had to eat like this, he could NOT do the job he does.

This video has stats and statistics related to health and wealth. It's WAY TOO fast for most people to read, so I had to pause it, and we watched it several times to record all of the information. (Watching it over to record the information was a student initiative.)
Once we had watched these videos we had several discussions about poverty. I really had to work hard to gain student trust around this issue. Many students struggled with the idea that poverty is not always the "fault" of the individual living in poverty. As a society, we often think of "those people" as lazy and if they would just work harder... Well, students in a classroom are like a little "mini society" and we had to work through some of the ideas they had around poverty. I had to reassure my students that they were not to feel guilty about this information. They might have different opinions than the views that are being expressed in the classroom, that's okay too. I just asked them to be open to learning something new. For the most part the information spoke for itself. I witnessed a lot of growth during these lessons. I saw minds being expanded and new understandings emerging. It was pretty cool.

Currently, my students are developing menu plans for a week for a family of four. They are using flyers to price their menus for the week. Once they have a total amount for the week, they are to half that amount and make changes or substitutions to their food menus. When they have completed that, they are going to make a Venn diagram to see if there are similarities in the foods that they took off the list and added. The middle part will be the foods that stayed the same, and the two outer circles will be the food that they added or took off. We did this activity after I "front-loaded" the videos, and students jig-sawed information about nutrition (carbs, proteins, vitamins...)

Where are we going? My students will eventually take a trip to 2oth Street to visit some of the businesses in the area and the Friendship Inn. This is inquiry: physically going to learn. Today a residential school survivor is coming to our school to speak to students about her experience. I hope this helps them to make a connection - they can connect all of this abstract learning to a real live person. They can see how the Indian Act has impacted the life of a real person. I think it will be powerful.

Again, I have to thank the Saskatchewan Arts Board for our TreatySmarts grant. Without this grant, all of the cool activities would not be possible.

Tweaking the question

On Friday I had the opportunity to hear a woman speak on the topic of inquiry based learning and questioning skills. It was about more than that, but the questioning was the part that I fixated on. I've worked on my math teaching skills, my management skills, my organizational skills, but not my questioning skills. Once I managed weight time and the reasons for questioning versus the type of questions, I never really gave it very much more thought. Turns out, it's a skill that needs to be practiced, and it can help your students to activate their higher level thinking skills.

I'm still sorting this new learning out for myself, but I will try to give an example from my current assignment as to how I "tweaked" the question. I gave my students an assignment about human rights. It asked them to formulate a question and then research the answer. Then I let them go to it. Really and truly, I never thought about how I worded the assignment - except that I wanted to make it clear. Here is how I first wrote the assignment:

 

As you can see, it's a pretty basic (maybe even lame) assignment. I know the students were interested in the research because the topic was so captivating, and everything we had done up to this point helped to build their enthusiasm. When I typed out the assignment, I was focused on the research aspect. I had started to notice that the children wanted to "google" everything. The books displayed in our classroom were not being used. I put more thought into how I'd get them to use books than I did the question.

After our in-service, I spent way too much time worrying about this assignment. I finally put it to rest by telling myself that I wanted to go to this school to learn and grow as an educator. This is my first opportunity, and I just need to grab it. So here is my attempt to write a better question:

So, is it perfect? I really don't know. I haven't wrapped my head around asking questions that get at that deep critical thinking. I think I have a lot more reading to do, but I do know this: The wording of my second assignment is more fun, and children are more motivated when an activity is perceived as fun.

My colleague across the hall has a wonderful bulletin board about thick and thin questions. I've taken a few of my students into her room to look at the board and then decide if their question is too thin or if it's thick. Thankfully, my colleague told me that she has a second copy of the bulletin board and that I can have it. When I get it from her, I'll post it on here for my colleagues who are interested. The basic idea is that asking questions like: When did it happen, who discovered it, where did this take place, are thin questions. They can be answered in one google search, and one sentence. A thick question gets kids thinking. A question like what might a child soldier be feeling is a much deeper question. Can you imagine a child researching child soldiers and then trying to explain what they might be thinking or feeling. That's higher level thinking.

To recap, I've learned that one good question can take your class from a lower level of thinking to a higher level. It's really quite exciting. We were also directed to check out a website called The Critical Thinking Consortium. They have activities and good questions for all grades and across a lot of the curriculum. There are free samples that you can download as PDF files. The Stewart Resource Centre also has all of their print material to borrow. A membership is $40 for a year. I believe the public system has a membership for its teachers, but our division does not. Here is a link: TC2

To any of my teacher friends who have made it to the bottom of this blog, thank you for reading and if you are so inspired to focus on your questions: happy tweaking.