Student Learning

PoLT Online Professional Learning Resource – Principle 4

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You Could Try This

Designing and planning the learning environment: Principle 4

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What whole school strategies impact on teacher actions?

  • Thinking is demonstrated by a range of performances
  • Higher order thinking processes can be used with all students
  • Understanding is a continuous process across the years of schooling
  • Different learners have different thinking preferences
  • Curriculum integration across the years of schooling promotes real world problem solving
  • What thinking skills will be selected from the VELS Thinking Domain? (http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/essential/interdisciplinary/thinking)
  • Questioning is the basis of effective inquiry and scaffolds higher order thinking processes
  • Understanding develops through opportunities to explain, clarify, probe, make connections and identify problems and issues
  • Good questioning is a key skill that shapes whether students acquire the above dispositions.
  • Deep levels of thinking and application are integrated and are supported by throughlines (Blythe 1998) across disciplines, levels and stages of schooling

Download worksheet: VELS - the thinking domain has three dimensions (Word - 170Kb)

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Learning and teaching tactics and skills

Tactics and teacher skill are directed to ensuring the classroom supports goal setting, personal competence and sustained thinking occurs. Students recognise that:

  • My learning style is known and respected.
  • I will have opportunities to be challenged with support.
  • I will be able to demonstrate my learning in a variety of ways.
  • My particular needs and interests will guide inquiry.
  • Inquiry has a real world application – assessment practice reflect this.

Web Link: Beyond Monet: The Artful Science of Instructional Integration. (http://www.beyondmonet.ca/ch3_6.html)

Download worksheet: Productive Pedagogies™ (Word - 164Kb)

Tactics can include:

  • teaching through collaborative and small group opportunities, e.g Socratic dialogue, Community of Inquiry ,Group investigation, Arts based projects
  • applying and teaching skills in context, ICT is used where relevant; students are aware of application of the thinking skill in real life settings
  • using Bloom’s Taxonomy 1956 (revised Anderson & Krathwohl 2001) to check the prior knowledge of students in all areas of the hierarchy
  • supporting creative and divergent thinking through frameworks such as Williams 1993, PBL, Kaplan model
  • using brainstorming, comparing/contrasting, hypothesising, visualising, associating ideas, classifying, evaluating, analyzing, sequencing, prioritising, intrapersonal skills, also, to support creative, critical, divergent, inductive thinking
  • actively encouraging learners’ participation through inside/outside circles, PMI, 6 thinking hats, think/pair/share place mat, graffiti,3 step interview, mindmaps, concept maps, graphic organisers, venn diagrams, fishbone, role plays, producing digital imagery

TIP: try the Glossary section for more details of the suggested approaches

Download worksheet: Resources (Word - 168Kb)

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Components of an effective lesson design

  • Plans for thinking skill/s
  • Selects a tactic to suit the purpose
  • Forms groups to enable opened responses
  • Monitors and assess thinking processes and skills
  • Evaluates lessons/units

Download worksheet: Components of an effective lesson design - A checklist (Word - 156Kb)

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What grouping?

  • whole class
  • small groups, structured
  • or unstructured?
  • how are groups formed, eg. what size, are they based on friendship, mixed ability, specialist support for explicit teaching?

Download worksheet: Groupings (Word - 160Kb)

 

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Action planning with strategies in mind

The teaching team through their ongoing research and planning ensures they are familiar with the recent research and literature on:

  • questioning open and closed
  • cognitive domain questions
  • affective and creative questions
  • reflective and metacognitive questions
  • thinking curriculum and frameworks
  • inquiry learning ( e.g. integrated curriculum)

Web Link: Beyond Monet: The Artful Science of Instructional Integration (http://www.beyondmonet.ca/ch3_7.html)

Download worksheet: Action planning (Word - 160Kb)

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Reflection

  • How will I link to students’ past experiences, previous lessons taught?
  • Do I involve all students, actively in an atmosphere that empowers them to be question askers?
  • Have I made the students’ involvement that supports and structures ‘thinkers’ in the lesson objective clear?

Download worksheet: Reflection (Word - 162Kb)

 

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Other support

Leadership teams provide strategic support to ensure time is allocated for professional learning that focuses experiences in a wide range of questioning approaches e.g essential, hypothetical, strategic, provocative, etc (McKenzie 2000); content neutral (Golding 2002); affective & creative (Gross 2005); and team thinking skills (Bennett & Rolheiser 2001; Murdoch & Wilson 2004). Cross disciplinary team meet to support wider thinking on planning resources and onging monitoring and review of units of work.