Each table team came up with a different response and fair reasons for their answer... And to top it off, no one chose 'Tuning in' which is what I'd originally planned for this point in our unit to be. It was crazy!
This year I wanted to get the students input into how the inquiry cycle should be present in our classroom. I hope it can be something we all learn about, reflect on and become adept at using to plan our inquiries.
It was tough. The Grade 5's looked at different infographics people had created to represent Kath Murdoch's inquiry stages, but found them a bit full of words for the youngest members of our target audience (Grade 1 artists) so we let our thoughts stew for another week.
Next, the G5s decided they wanted to use the large coloured dots in the centre of our tables and just have the headings and visuals - but which visuals? Found ones? Drawn ones? Photographs?
Another week later and we finally had two students finish their artwork with enough time left over in the lesson to put some thought into the inquiry cycle challenge. They put found images with each inquiry stage heading and gave each phase a back-up heading that students could use to cue them in if the visual isn't helpful to them: tuning in got to be 'curious' as well, finding out is also 'searching', sorting out had 'organising' added, going further got the alternate heading 'challenge' etc.
The other Grade 5 class I teach used the recently-created student-version of the inquiry cycle for reflection. Straight away the amount of conversation I heard & saw around the room was triple anything I'd experienced when using teacher-created (often question-filled) graphics.
I asked my table teams to discuss which inquiry phase they thought we were at in our first unit, and they were told they would need to explain their reasoning to the class once discussion time was up.
Each table team came up with a different response and fair reasons for their answer. I wrote all 5 on the whiteboard. I found their responses fascinating and told them so. And to top it off, no one chose 'Tuning in' which is what I'd originally planned for this point in our unit to be. It was crazy! But in a really good way.
It lead to a great chat about how you move in and out of these phases of learning (not just at school, but in life too) and don't always do them "in order", you may even experience a few phases in a short space of time and/or need to repeat several stages before making progress.
I explained that I use these stages when planning my own projects as well as our units and that it was great for me to see/hear how they interpret the stages and have experienced the unit so far. It made me stop and think, and now I'll review the rest of this unit with the student's thoughts in mind.
I also loved that at the table that had the inquiry cycle visuals stuck down in the middle of it, students used their erasers as they were chatting to keep track of which phase(s) they thought we were in at the moment. They weren't asked to; they did it because it was helpful to do so. The visual reference was helpful: job done!
I think this is going to be an eye-opening addition to our room, but I'll let you know once I've tried it with other grades and it's not the flavour of the month any more. And this may be presumptuous, but I'm already looking forward to how different students might re-imagine this in the future too.
PS. I may be more excited about this than the G5 students because after our 'great chat', the students voted unanimously to use the same visuals at the other 4 tables rather than come up with alternate visuals for each one. Grade 5s thank you for making me laugh out loud today, your honesty is awesome 😄.
