Sythesizing learning

Chicken or egg?

The kids have been studying myths. We poured over myths from different cultures, analysed the differences between myths and folktales and thoroughly enjoyed a week of story telling. The students asked their grannys and grand pas about myths and came back with an amazing repertoire. The writing followed next. We made an impressive class checklist that the students would use during independent writing time. I modelled one with my class, and then the kids attempted to write one in groups. Finally they wrote their own myths and we published them during our writing workshop. All the pieces were assessed following the 6 traits of writing and the kids got a descriptive feedback which helped them improve their writing considerably. The final outcome was a Grade 4 Anthology of Myths that have been displayed in the school library for the rest of the school to enjoy.

The reason I am writing this blog post is because of what happened next.It was a hot Thursday morning. Tired. Kids listless. Classroom boiling hot. Fan droning ineffectively above hot heads.
I asked the kids to write (we had started explanation writing) an explanation of what comes first, the chicken or the egg :).
Expectedly, there was a heated discussion which went on for over 10 minutes.
Exasperated, many of the kids looked up at me and said that it was simply impossible to explain which came first, so if you please Miss, may we write a myth?! Wow! Bang!!! Mr Bloom would have been very proud of this moment. They had understood myths really well and were capable of using it appropriately in a totally different context.
I guess this is what we wait for. A time when students, without being prompted, are able to synthesize what they have learnt, and apply their knowledge to solve problems.

According to the IB,

The central purpose of teaching and learning is to help students develop and extend the concepts they use to understand the world, solve problems and communicate …. A new concept is developed when meaningful connections are made between bodies of knowledge and other existing concepts and the process of making those connections leads to a deeper understanding of the world.

This was my formative assessment. What need for a summative??!!

I was pleased that sultry Thursday afternoon.

Comments

Generalization-Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 3)

This post is the third of our blog post series on how to design lessons for conceptual understanding. Part 1 here Part 2 here Strategy 3 : Generalizations You may have come across Lynn Erickson's diagram on the structure of knowledge. In my IB workshop's I always like to present the avocado model alongside this diagram when I am talking about facts. The intention of inquiry-based teaching and conceptually-driven understanding (or Concept-based inquiry- whatever terminology suits your fancy) is to enable students to make generalizations. In other words, can they transfer their learning to a new context because they have understood what they learnt. In order to make generalizations, we need to first plan lessons that help students acquire facts/topics that are interesting and worth knowing. Bringing in local and global issues that are relevant to the topic help students as they begin to compare the topics and see emerging patterns. Remember, facts and concepts have a syn...

Classification -Designing Your Lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 1)

In this series, we will discuss how we can design lessons for conceptual understanding. Having recently completed an upskilling course with IB, I felt we may all benefit from looking at some of these strategies and how they might look like in our PYP classrooms. Strategy 1: Classification Source: Ibo.org In this post, I will be focusing on the research-backed strategy, "classification". Chadwick (2009) highlights that classification helps develop conceptual understanding by allowing students to organize information, recognize patterns, and understand relationships among concepts. Here are some examples across several disciplines on how I have used tools to classify. Math Class 1) In my math class (Grade 3) instead of having students simply rote learn the names of the shapes and their properties, have them sort the shapes based on the number of sides, angles and symmetry. Even better, use the Concept Attainment Strategy (I keep returning to this strategy be...

Concepts-In-Use: Designing your lessons for Conceptual Understanding (Part 6)

Concepts-In Use www.ibo.org In this post, one more strategy takes center stage when it comes to designing lessons that aid conceptual understanding in our students: Concept-In-Use. This strategy should be used once several concepts have been covered in class. A great way to know whether your students are internalizing the concepts is to ask them to explain the connections between two concepts. For example: In Math Ask them to convert a fraction to a percentage. Or a percentage to a decimal. Can they clearly explain the connection? Can they use drawings to support their explanation? Can they articulate the difference between a prism and a pyramid. How are they same? How are they different? How can you represent data visually? Bar graphs, pictographs, line charts are all concepts. As a designer of conceptual lessons, a teacher needs to be keenly aware of the connections between concepts. For instance, is the Grade 3 teacher awar...

Learning Never Stops

Search This Blog