Spontaneity in the classroom

"The ability to work with, understand, and use data has become an essential life skill and requirement for an ever-expanding range of jobs and careers.  Data is everywhere around us.  Ninety percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years." (Marr, 2018) 

Many of my unplanned lessons (happy deviations) have been far more powerful than my planned ones. This post is not touting the idea of ignoring planning. It is just a recognition and celebration of unplanned inquiry and its potential and power.

I would like to share a completely unplanned lesson with you. This happened almost a year ago and unfortunately, I do not have pictures and graphs to garnish my words.

Here goes...

The vice principal of our school walked into class one day looking very grave. She was clearly upset about something. It turned out that someone in the boys washroom was not following the rules. He was peeing on the floor. As a school, we were all supposed to keep a log of students visiting the washrooms during class time. This was for safety reasons (fire drills, etc). My co-teacher ensured all the students filled in this book before they left the class. I was not convinced that the data would be useful to her and it seemed I was right. Defeated, she retreated.

My curiosity was however peaked. It would be interesting to find out the total time the students spent in the washroom. I asked two of my students to sort a week's data in a way that made sense to them. They eagerly got to work. They alphabetically arranged their names and started adding up the the time taken by each student. They asked if they could go a bit further and plot the data in a the form of a bar graph. I was proud of my Grade 3s!

The data revealed two interesting facts. My most diligent student who was always at the top of the class, clocked the most time! She enjoyed learning and there had to be another reason why she spent so much time in the washroom. "I need had to wash my hands many times a day, Ms. Singh," she told me. She seemed anxious and I reassured her that it was okay. She, however didn't like the idea of being a topper in this instance because we noticed that from that day onwards, she went to the washroom only when absolutely necessary.

The second data revelation was a bit more complicated. Coming a very close second was the little terror of my class. He was also a very astute young boy who questioned everything and always wanted evidence. His parents were at my doorstep every other day to either apologize or complain about something. Let's call him Daniel. 

Next morning, when the students shared the data with the class, Daniel declared the data fake, and sulked through the meeting. 

"But Daniel, your signature is in the log book. Many, many signatures," Katherine patiently explained. 

"Rubbish. Give me the log book." Daniel stretched out his hand.

As the rest of the class settled into their morning routine, Daniel meticulously raked over the data, and started calculating the time. It took him awhile as he did not trust the data his peers had analyzed. He started the whole process from the very beginning.

In the end, data won. We had to let Daniel process and accept the information, which he eventually did.

From that day onwards, every single student in my class monitored their washroom times and tried to limit them. A student came up with an idea. Why not take the time to visit the washroom during recess in order to avoid missing lessons. Great idea!

The next week when the vice principal came around with another fruitless attempt at catching the culprit (the peeing never really stopped that year), she saw an almost blank log book. 

I'm afraid, your class has been neglecting the log book, Ms. Singh." she said disappointed.

"No we haven't. Let me explain to you why it is blank..." exclaimed Daniel, rushing up to her.

My students had changed their behaviour based on relevant, authentic, significant data.