Hi, y’all — We could use a few more of your great ideas for the November issue of SLM’s Nudging Toward Inquiry column. If you can help, please submit below!
Thanks,
Kristin
Well, summer is here, but we’re hard at work on School Library Monthly for 2010-2011.
This year, for the “Nudging Toward Inquiry” column, we’re going to examine one step on the inquiry journey instead of looking at content-specific lesson plan makeovers.
You can view the whole list - and submit to any of this year’s columns - here.
Even better, contribute to the first article — what do you do to awaken prior knowledge in students? How do you assess this stage? Click here to contribute.
The more diverse ideas we get, the more holistic and helpful the article can be!
Thanks!
I’m doing some team-teaching with a favorite colleague in another elementary school. Throughout the year, we’ve been looking at how we can, as an elementary team, deepen the kinds of work that are happening in our elementary school libraries. We’ve used several sources as inspiration:
Today, we kicked off a three-day kindergarten lesson. We began by gathering the children into a seated circle and pulling a mastodon tooth borrowed from our wonderful district Environmental Center . We pulled it out of our Mystery Bag and asked kids to pass it around and explore it. Many weighed the item in their hands or ran their fingers in and out of the ridges. As the object passed from child to child, there was a kind of stillness, almost a religous quiet, that filled the space.
We then asked them to turn and talk to their partners (one of the strategies we’ve been working on extensively, and something that merits a post of its own!) about their observations.
We then counted down (”5-4-3-2-1-zero noise”) and asked the group three questions:
Those three questions were ones I developed when I was trying to wrap my head around how to work with primary sources and young children for Go Straight to the Source (Cherry Lake, 2010):
The Library of Congress and the National Archives both have amazing worksheets for older students that really dig down deep, but with younger students, it’s more the sense of wonderment and exploration and questioning that we wanted to develop. Those three questions, written about in the book shown in the graphic above, seem to work really well in achieving those goals.
You know, sometimes in May, when we are swamped and stressed and spring fever hits our students, we don’t expect these kinds of holy conversations, where kids are immersed and far more observant and thoughtful than we anticipate. But today was a day when those kids rose to the occasion. Some were tentative, some were quiet, but we really sensed both how much time they need to practice questioning and observation and what their capacity was.
The lesson continued by looking at the PebbleGo description of the mastodon and both of us stopping to discuss the entry at the end of each “page.” On one slide, we thought aloud about what it meant to be 8 feet tall and decided it was about as high as the ceiling overhang. On another, we read about bumpy teeth and thought aloud about how that sounded like the tooth we had passed around. And on a third, we held up our own fists to see if we agreed with the page above that a mastodon’s tooth was about the same size as a pair of adult male fists. We weren’t sure we agreed with that, so each group went into Turn and Talk again to compare it to something else, reporting out its decision (a head, a foot, a football).
When checkout came, one of us scribed a new learning dictated by each child, then the child continued on to checkout, a simple way to note what had been learned.
Next time, we’re comparing that tooth to a real human tooth in a SKULL!!!!! (uh, a REAL SKULL, people) and to a larger, different mammoth tooth, before sending students off in pairs to learn about woolly mammoths. We hope they’ll bring their Turn and Talk skills and use the modeling of how we talk through research to learn even more.
We won’t be making any paper hats or doing any dittoes or writing up any reports. But we are hoping that we’re developing curiosity and wonder that will translate into better thinking in the years to come.
We talk a lot in our business about collaboration with classroom teachers but just as precious is collaboration with our media colleagues. I’m lucky: I have a gig this year that allows me both the time to team teach in other buildings and be in my own. But we’re also finding that with some creative scheduling, we can sometimes visit one another’s schools, and that principals will support this kind of professional development when they see how our practice improves. (We are lucky to have half-time tech support who can cover for us if we can find a time when we’re not teaching.)
What I loved about today is that I felt like the lesson didn’t feel like “my” ideas or “her” kids. We navigated the waters together and, when I reflect on the lesson, I think it brought both of our skillsets to the table. My colleague is very good at setting a calm tone that makes wonderment emerge, far better than I can. But I know I’ll be better at dialing down my energy now that I’ve seen her in action.
Today, we followed up our jointly-taught lesson with some time to reflect, and then some time with a third colleague planning a professional development morning for one building to use in the spring (team taught by the other two) and in the other building in the fall. Teamwork splits the work but adds to the skills. As our three brains worked together, we wrestled with what information to share, what each building needed, and what felt superfluous. How lucky I am to have colleagues like these.
