As a newish AP Seminar teacher, I feel a little overwhelmed with the amount I have to cover with my students. Luckily, it is almost all inquiry-based skills. Charged with helping students through three types of performance tasks (an argument analysis, a team research project and presentation, and an individual research project and presentation), I […]
In my AP Research class, students complete a year-long research project on a topic of their choosing; because they have to follow disciplines-specific rules and implement an appropriate research method, they end up having quite different learning plans. One student is currently gathering evidence through interviews and surveys; another is completing a t-test of secondary […]
Peer feedback has great potential. It can help students gain a clearer understanding of an assignment’s expectations. It can provide valuable suggestions for improvement. It can highlight kids’ areas of expertise. And, hey, at it’s best, it can even cut back on a teacher’s grading workload! However, it can also yield the dreaded, waste-of-time response, […]
How often do we as teachers think about our own learning when designing the learning experiences of others? Sometimes “school-learning” seems so different than the learning we do every day. Maybe in an attempt to make things “more streamlined” and “clear” for students we are taking some of the learning out of learning. Writing this […]
One of the core concepts behind our book, Letting Go, is opening up the classroom to student voice, which is also the focus of NCTE’s 108th Annual Convention. We’re so excited to head to Houston to celebrate student voices and share our work with all of you! We’ll be explaining the Inquiry Learning Plan, which […]
When you’re a little kid, you’re a little bit of everything: artist, scientist, athlete, scholar. Sometimes it seems like growing up is the process of giving those things up one by one. I guess we all have one thing we regret giving up–one thing we really miss that we gave up because we were too […]
The type of learning encouraged by the ILP is and should be messy, not just for students but also for teachers. We share Will Richardson’s view that teachers should strive to be “master learners.” We see ourselves as learners everyday. We work to hone our ability to ask great questions and guide students through each […]
The school year is well underway and students are at the point where they are still excited to be learning and have grown comfortable with their teachers and classes. My seniors in Honors Imaginative Process are learning about the creative process by reading nonfiction texts by authors such as Stephen King and Elizabeth Gilbert. They’re also writing daily and working with each other to provide feedback and do mini-presentations on aspects of creativity. Because this is our first unit, students began by developing essential and guiding questions together as well as practicing the same standards as their peers. They were excited about the possibilities, but as an experienced inquiry teacher, I knew what was coming next: the point where they’ve laid all the groundwork for the unit and they ask, Now what? (more…)
We were fortunate to have Will Richardson do the Foreword for Letting Go. We asked him for several reasons: he was a former colleague, his daughter experienced the ILP first-hand in Meg’s class, and he wrote a book called Why School?, in which he issues the following challenge to educators: So, in the near term, […]
At convocation, our superintendent, Dr. Jeffrey Moore, spoke about the upcoming school year and the goals for the district. One part of his presentation included his insights into Greg Satell’s “innovation matrix” and how it can be applied to work we do in education. Those of us in the field know that we are often innovating, always evolving. If you compare your first year teaching to your current practice, you can probably spot some obvious (and perhaps embarrassing) differences! We need to constantly adapt our practice to meet our students’ needs and to help them develop skills like flexibility and resilience. But what Satell’s matrix demonstrates is there are different types of innovation, and they are all important. Of course, it got me thinking about the ILP, both as an innovative model for teachers but more importantly as a tool to help students innovate. Because if that’s what we’re expected to do as adults, then that’s what we need to help our students achieve. (more…)