Remember this one?
Last week, we presented our seventh grade students with this viral video from 2009 as a provocation for a brand new class at our school. We're teaching a class on leadership this year, and we thought this might be an interesting and fun way to get our students thinking about how people can be influenced to do things and reflect on what it means to be a leader.
As they have in the past, they generated inquiry questions as they watched, and later sorted them into factual, debatable and conceptual questions.
An exciting part of teaching this new course is the fact that I'm co-teaching with a colleague from the math department. As an English teacher, it brings a dynamic aspect and a fresh way to my looking at the way students think, as we build the class from the ground up, working off of the students' inquiry.
As we discussed and sorted their questions we noticed that the most popular question was by far, "Why are they dancing?" Whether this was a factual or conceptual question offered much for discussion, but the more we talked about it, the more we realized that our students were really focused on the dancing - the easily observable, the comfortable place for their thinking to go. They were becoming trapped in their thinking, so I tried to shift it slightly. I suggested to them that were thinking of the question like this - "Why are they dancing?" When I tried to shift their thinking to "Why are they dancing?", they struggled to take that perspective. They were able to consider the perspective of the players (the guy, the crowd, even the unseen performer), but they struggled to change the perspective of the question.
This is when my co-teacher jumped in with an analogy. She asked the students to consider the following statements that might be said by imaginary parents to their two children: I love you. I love you. and I love you. The first two they understood - I love you, but dad doesn't. I love you, but not her. The last one though, was more difficult. How can we shift the thinking from the people involved to the concepts involved?
And that, I think, is what's at the heart of inquiry and the MYP philosophy. How can we make these conceptual shifts in our thinking? This leadership class is bound to present us with many opportunities to create new and amazing curricular opportunities for our students this year. We will be focusing our feedback around the Approaches to Learning and this has me considering critical thinking and transfer. How can we apply the "I love you" strategy to other classes? In Language and Literature, it might happen in generating; now that I've picked a story line to craft, how might I change the perspective to write in a fresh and innovative way? In Design, students might come up with a completely workable solution, but then ask themselves, "Okay, now how can I approach the challenge from a completely different angle?" Other content areas must be ripe for the same shifts. What about your disciplines? Leave a comment as to how you think this might look in your class.
I'm looking forward to a great year of learning. Learning more about leadership, about myself as a teacher, learning how to effectively collaborate with a co-teacher and continuing to navigate the Middle Course as I continue to help my students transition from the primary grades into high school!
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