Skip to main content

Vow of Silence




The other day I happened to come across my virtual Google friend Craig Dwyer's post A vow of Silence . I loved the idea! It would be great to be silent for the whole day. I had my doubts as my 8 year olds are absolutely, unequivocally irrepressible. What I did not realize is that my day's lesson plans had to be carved and moulded to suit this paradigm shift!  So if you want to try it out, keep that in mind, Comrades:)

The children loved it! Something new is always greeted with widening eyes and a toothless grin. They actually did quite well apart from a few suffocated throttling noises from one of my students :)

But this is not why I am writing the post. I write it for a totally different reason...

A few day after our Vow of Silence episode, my students were trying to find out the perimeter and area of their silhouette using wool and post-its. They were busy and the voice level was more than the acceptable 5 on our noise-level continuum. I could hear them arguing and fighting for the resources. Some where debating about how to place the post-its. Though a great inquiry time, I noticed their collaboration skill was not that great. I left the class to get a glass of water from the dispenser outside. When I came back after a few minutes, there was pin-drop silence! The students were hunched over the silhouette and working quietly, efficiently together. They did not do this to please me. Someone had decided to execute the LAW OF SILENCE...and somehow they all learnt to work together. They gesticulated and nodded. Some of them got busy and quietly passed out post-its or adjusted the wool.
They found their own solution through the medium of silence.

A novel way to teach conflict resolution?




Reference:

http://www.teachingparadox.com/2013/02/a-vow-of-silence.html
http://bitsofwisdom.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/silence-is-golden.png

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Unravelling the inquiry cycle in a PYP class room

“ People can make choices to support the sustainability of the Earth’s energy resources .” Me to students : Does that make sense? Students to me : (after a while)...not really...  Their understanding of "energy" during the pre-assessment task also reflected a superficial knowledge of the term. And thus our unit of inquiry started. As I was browsing the net, I came across this picture prompt- a map, which I thought would serve as a great provocation. The annual energy consumption per person . Kids love guessing where countries are, so it was a great way to address some geography at this point.  I had also been reading Craig Dwyer's  post  which inspired me to change my inquiry cycle and use a simpler one. Wonder (while exploring)- Explore (while wondering)- Create (while reflecting)- Reflect (with subsequent wonderings). I was feeling more at ease now. The map allowed the students to make a lot of inferences based on patterns whi...