Now that we were more comfortable using Explain Everything and Draw and Tell, we decided that we needed to provide some direct instruction for the students in order to demonstrate what good oral communication and critical thinking skills looked like. We felt that by documenting student work both pre- and post- direct instruction, we could begin to learn what works best and what may not work for our students. We wanted to be able to measure their growth throughout this journey and not just at the beginning and end. In our last session, we compared student work samples from each of our classes. While comparing with each other, we noticed that the settings where the learning took place (e.g., pod, classroom, hallway) and our time delay (e.g., how much time passed between when the student made their creation and when they sat down and explained it) both varied quite a bit between our classes. This brought up a few questions that we decided to explore:
1) Is a quiet space (e.g., pod or hallway) better than in the busy (and often noisy!) classroom environment? 2) Is it better for a student to have a time delay between when they made their creation and when they explain it (in order to think of more details) or is it better to have students explain their creations right away, when they are excited about them? To give us more insight into these questions, we planned to ask our students to do a recording both in the moment, and after 30 minutes, to see which might produce more detailed explanations. We also planned to take these snapshots of student learning in two different settings: In a quiet space (e.g., pod/hallway) and also in the classroom, where the learning originally occurred. After our pre-direct instruction samples were finished, we planned to teach our students how to explain their creations in detail. But how did we do that? Did the students show progress? Check out our next post to find out!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Authors
We are a group of Kindergarten educators in Ontario, Canada. Archives
May 2017
Categories |