Building Shared Understanding
As we get ready to start the new school year, we, of course, have to begin unpacking and understanding our units of inquiry as teachers before we can then invite students into the process. (Although as I write this, I wonder about doing the opposite)
From one of my professional development (PD) conferences, I got this planning wheel from Kath Murdoch that posits really great questions and prompts to get the conversation going. We have used this in the past to varying degrees of success. Often these graphic organizers or processes can take away the dynamic nature of the conversation. It becomes another box to fill versus something we can use and refer to constantly.
I am invested in getting away from screens while we unpack and doing things on paper, in person, with erasers, scratch marks, messes, etc. so I was committed to filling this organizer!
One thing I noticed in the past is that we got bogged down with thinking about where to start as it is a circle it really shouldn’t matter, but it became a point of tension about what would be most conducive to a productive conversation.
From a separate Kath Murdoch PD (up to two now), she talked a lot about engaging students, especially elementary students (which also very much so connects to another PD I did about differentiation with Carol Ann Tomlinson).
If we are not engaging students, there will be zero learning happening. Without the buy-in and the interest, learning is sterile, forced, distant, irrelevant, etc. the list goes on.
One simple tweak Kath mentioned (that I used to success in my own classroom) is having reflection questions with numbers. Students then roll the dice to answer the question that matches their number. This is such a small tweak but has huge impact. It also links to my previous post about using the tarot cards. The objective nature of well there it is, I might as well do it versus which question really matches my vibe?
So I decided to do this with our planning organizer: numbers 1-8. I have these giant foam die in my room that we used. There were smirks and laughter as die were rolled (yes, I know you can never land on 1, so I said I might make some executive decisions to more laughter as they know my fearless leader personality).
Our unit is all about decisions communities make: why they make them, what values they are based on, and how they use these values and decisions to solve problems. A big part of our philosophy moving forward was to put positive (reasonably) spins on our units and central ideas to get students focused on optimism in a world full of negativity and pessimism (understandably so).
We spent some time going through the questions and making all sorts of connections and covering loads of our school goals and outcomes (As you can see below, again pardon my handwriting).
In summary, something as simple as rolling dice and letting fate choose can spark conversations and eliminate awkward moments of where to start or who is leading where. It can be a great equilizer!
