Inquiry-Challenges and solutions..by us!

The aim of today is to see if there is one small action we can take that will help improve Inquiry Learning at our school. If we can focus on one small thing at a time, we can be striving to achieve some of our ‘we believe’ statements.

Here are the statements left behind in the staff room

1. We believe that all students should be passionate about something

2. We believe that we should be a benchmark within our region

3. We believe in students becoming independent learners

4. It is unacceptable that Inquiry does not fit into our literacy/numeracy

5. It is unacceptable that students aren’t motivated to learn

Last year school leadership drafted our values and made a commitment to develop not just literacy and numeracy skills but also the values of character, creativity, collaboration, curiosity and citizenship in all of our learners. Hopefully everything we do fits in with this philosophy. To acknowledge this we have taken the small steps of:

1. Including the 5C’s into our planning conversations (not just Inquiry planners but all of them).

2. Developing the Deep Learning rubric to assist with measuring these skills.

3. Shared Inquiry time- a recent initiative.

A couple of the groups managed to pick one small thing that they can work to improve, a couple of examples were to:

1. Use the Deep Learning Rubric in Inquiry sessions.

2. Build relationships with students from other classes.

3. Encourage authentic actions in Inquiry projects.

External providers of PD would be great and we are always on the lookout for excellent opportunities, but sometimes the best professional learning we will do is learning by doing, reflecting on what was done and working together to improve. I hope we can choose one small thing and have a go!

Also this post on our staff blog has links to heaps of related videos if you would like to learn more. Please check it out!