Creating A Classroom Community: Inquiry and Dialogue: Week 8 Lecture Summary 3 March 2008
Creating A Classroom Community: Inquiry and Dialogue: Week 8 Lecture Summary 3 March 2008
Creating A Classroom Community: Inquiry and Dialogue: Week 8 Lecture Summary 3 March 2008
Students share the responsibility for thinking and doing: they distribute
their intellectual activity so that the burden of managing the whole process
does not fall to any one individual.
I would suggest that they need to be asked questions whose answers can be
'figured out' not by relying on memorized rules for moving numbers around but
by thinking about what numbers and symbols mean. They need to be treated
like sense-makers rather than rememberers and forgetters. They need to see
connections between what they are supposed to be learning in school and
things they care about understanding outside of school, and these
connections need to be related to the substance of what they are supposed to
be learning. They need to learn to do computation competently and efficiently
without losing sight of the meaning of what they are doing and its relation to
solving real problems.”
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Class Meetings
Theme-based inquiry projects fit the criteria suggested in How People Learn:
“robust knowledge and understandings are socially constructed through talk, activity, and
interaction around meaningful problems and tools”
They also help to create community because students collaborate in working toward
shared goals
Sharing and discussing what is discovered provides opportunities for Knowledge Building
through genuine dialogue
Planning a culminating event, such as an Open Day or Parents’ Night, gives added
purpose and makes contact with the wider community
Many ideas for such projects can be found on the internet at:
http://www.project-approach.com/examples/projects.htm
http://spice.ees.ufl.edu/theme.asp
http://www2.edc.org/CCT/research_inquiry.asp
Essential Questions
Essential questions spark our curiosity and sense of wonder. They derive from some
deep wish to understand some thing which matters to us.
Answers to essential questions cannot be found. They must be invented. It is something
like cooking a great meal. The researcher goes out on a shopping expedition for the raw
ingredients, but "the proof is in the pudding." Students must construct their own answers
and make their own meaning from the information they have gathered. They create insight.
Answering such questions may take a life time, and even then, the answers may only be
tentative ones. This kind of research, like good writing, should proceed over the course of
several weeks, with much of the information gathering taking place outside of formally
scheduled class hours.
Essential questions engage students in the kinds of real life applied problem-solving
suggested by nearly every new curriculum report or outline curriculum standards such as
the NCTM and the Science Standards.
Essential questions usually lend themselves well to multidisciplinary investigations,
requiring that students apply the skills and perspectives of math and language arts while
wrestling with content from social studies or science.
Designing a Curriculum Unit for Unde rstanding
THEME
(A Way of Orienting Curriculum Content to StudentsÕLives and Interests
e.g. Community, Exploration, Water)
ÒBig IdeasÓ/ÓEnduring Unde rstandingsÓ
(see Curriculum Standards)
Activities
(that Allow for Inquiry, Dialogue)
This curriculum unit took place in a grades seven/eight class in a school serving students
from minority groups that had traditionally been academically unsuccessful. The class
participated in an international project to plan a (virtual) expedition for the exploration of
Mars. http://www.marsquestonline.org/investigations/index.html
While, together with other classes around North America, they investigated important
topics, such as the atmosphere on Mars, the availability of water, and so on, this class’s
particular responsibility was to research the conditions on the surface of Mars and to
design the various types of vehicles that would be needed during the exploration.
They also had to create one segment of the habitat in which they would be living while
on Mars. Using heavy guage plastic sheeting, they had to make an inflatable rectangular
prism of dimensions length 3.5 meters, width 3.5 meters, height 2.5 meters.
The class is divided into 10 groups of students. Each group has to construct a scale model of the
habitat that they will live in. The dimensions of the final habitat are to be length 3.5 meters,
width 3.5 meters, height 2.5 meters. The model is to be built to scale 1/10: 1 cm = 10 cm.
The teacher has bought a piece of plastic 4 meters long from a roll of folded plastic; if fully opened,
the sheet would be almost 3 meters wide, but it is packaged so that there are 4 layers, each 73
cm wide.
Problem
How can the 4 meter length of plastic sheet be most economically cut so that each of the
10 groups receives enough to construct their model habitat? What is the minimum number of cuts
necessary to achieve this? What are the dimensions of the largest piece that could be left?
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Recalling the quote from How People Learn -
http://www.edutopia.org/php/article.php?id=Art_631
Example http://www.smm.org/sln/monarchs/
NEXT WEEK
PLEASE SIT WITH YOUR STUDY GROUP