Sharing my COL Inquiry

Today Kelsey, Gabe and I were asked to talk about our COL inquiry with our colleagues during our staff meeting. Each of us shared an aspect of our inquiry that we were working on. I decided to give a brief overview of my COL inquiry before talking in more detail about some of the interventions that I had tried.

I talked about the student engagement surveys that my literacy class used as a means to help capture data based on their levels of engagement during lessons. I also mentioned how the goal was to help students build greater self efficacy by taking greater ownership of their learning.

I introduced and shared an example of the ground rules for talk template that I had modified based on Rob’s original template. Then I shared an image from the Vosaic programme that I had been trialing for my extended discussions.

Finally, all other staff members had the opportunity to talk about their inquiry projects once we were in smaller groups. It was a great opportunity to share our experiences and listen to how other inquiry projects were coming along.

Gamification of Extended Discussion

Earlier in the year, during a guided reading session, I focused on introducing extended discussion and establishing ground rules for talk with a group of students. I felt a little discouraged as the lesson did not go as well as planned and after a couple of weeks, I decided not to focus on it as much as I should have. At the time I felt that it was more important to establish routines and to get to know my students. 

Later in the year, I decided to revisit introducing extended discussions and explored ways to make it more effective. I was fortunate that my Team 5 Team Leader (Rob Wiseman) shared a template he had created to gamify the process. When I first trialed it with a group of target students in my literacy group, it was a success. Extended discussion time become a lot more fun to do, especially for the boys in the group. The aim was to prevent the cases of gold from being taken by the character Neo (from the Matrix). 

Here is an example of the template I used: