This week in EDIM 513, Inquiry Based Learning, we read “What the Work Requires of Schools” a SCANS report from 1991, “Understanding University Success” and looked at the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). Despite all of these publications coming out at different times over the course of the last 20+ years, they all shared commonalities and implications for our schools and the futures of the students we teach. It was interesting to read what the U.S. Department of Labor, a branch of our government expects our students to know before entering the workplace. I say this because funding for the technology needed to address many of these skills is virtually non-existent in many urban schools in Chicago or getting cut with the passing of each year. The type of critical thinking and problem solving skills and that the Department of Labor expects our students to possess are not addressed if we are stuck preparing students for standardized tests.

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Despite the realities that many schools face, what I realized this week is how fortunate I am to teach at a school that recognizes the importance of teaching process skills as opposed to just content. Our students experience a variety of learning experiences throughout the school week in their core and encore classes. They are taught by incredibly passionate, focused and dedicated teachers and receive a well rounded education that includes inquiry and project based learning coupled with readily available and working technology in grades K-8, as well as a technology enrichment class for one hour each week. While overall student growth is still more or less measured by test scores, we have worked tirelessly at finding that very important balance. My most burning question at this point is, with all of this knowledge of what universities and the workplace desires the students who pass through our classrooms to possess – the process, leadership, critical thinking and problem solving skills – why is the success of schools, effectiveness of teachers and academic achievement STILL measured with a multiple choice test?

Reading Resources from this week:

SCANS Report Appendix B and C: http://wdr.doleta.gov/SCANS/whatwork/whatwork.pdf
Understanding University Success- Introduction: https://www.epiconline.org/files/pdf/UUS_Complete.pdf
Understanding University Success- choose a content area (use link above to access the report).
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills and their Route 21 http://route21.p21.org

In my last blog post, I mentioned the impact that my graduate class, “Globalization & Advocacy” had on my lesson plans and how it forced me to rethink whether or not my lessons were addressing the skills that my students will need to compete in a global economy. Now I will spend the next 7 weeks exploring inquiry based learning, which is a nice complement to my previous class. My first week of class helped me realize that in many ways, inquiry based learning is already at the core of the class that I teach,  Encore Technology. I believe that technology presents many opportunities for inquiry with young students.  They are incredibly curious about technology, technology presents many opportunities for collaboration and problem solving,  technology tools allow students to construct projects and demonstrate their creativity.

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My 5th graders are designing innovations right now, being critiqued for their innovations, learning to tweak things based on others reactions and going through the process of marketing their innovations. My 4th graders are learning how to do Scratch programming, and I am driving much of this learning with inquiry and exploration.  In both cases, I have challenged them to work through their frustrations by helping one another, persisting, making changes, and expressing themselves through these projects. In both cases, I have attempted to let my students drive their learning and with both projects, decided to loose the tight schedule and deadlines in favor of seeing just how much students would persist in either situation. So far, the level of engagement has been beyond anything I expected.

One thing that I need to work on is the reflection piece. We do have student blogs and students do post their tech projects and summarize the project but this week I learned that reflection is a major component of inquiry based learning and I really need to make more time for reflection. My most burning question at this point is whether or not what I described is actually inquiry based learning. I am also interested in learning what I can do to ensure that the inquiry process is taking place across my technology curriculum.

We just finished up a successful poetry podcast unit in 5th grade and we’re onto bigger and better things! My current graduate class, “Globalization and Advocacy” is forcing me to critique and at times, rethink many of my Encore Tech units. A recent assignment asked us to create lesson plans that address cultural capital and globalization in some way. We were encouraged to think about lessons that would target skills that will be in demand in a globalized world. One skill that immediately came to mind is innovation, invention and creativity. While it is difficult to imagine exactly world will be like when these 5th graders graduate from college and look for a job, there is enough indication that a competitive and global job market is what they be entering. When we as educators and parents provide opportunities to spark their creativity, celebrate their individuality, foster self-confidence, encourage independent thinking, teach them empathy, and allow them to dream big, we are giving them the tools to become the innovators and success stories of the future.

The flexible curriculum in Encore Tech and the fact that we had just finished a project allowed me to not only write these lesson plans for my class, but also implement them in Encore Tech.  The fact that the 5th graders just finished studying inventors was a great connection to this unit!

This week each of my 5th grade Encore Tech classes spent time learning about and discussing the idea of innovation and inventions. We learned that “Innovation” is the process of making improvements by introducing something that is new and that “innovation” typically starts with a problem.  ”Invention” on the other hand is a unique discovery or finding. We learned how useful items like Post-It Notes (innovation), Velcro (invention), The Ball Point Pen (invention) and Google (innovation) were created.

Innovations and inventions are typically inspired by failure (a failure on the part of Stanford University Library sparked Sergy Brin and Larry Page to create a search engine. This evolved into Google.), inspired by need (no way to mark a page without damaging it. This evolved into Post-It Notes), inspired by nature (Velcro uses the same technique to “velcro” that burs found in the forest use to latch onto our clothing) or inspired by a discovery with no use (matter and energy were known to be related but Albert Einstein discovered a way to put those to use by creating the lightbulb).

The challenge for the next few weeks in Encore Tech is to come up with an innovation or an invention. These words are easy to confuse and it is important to help students understand the distinction.

An inventor is someone who comes up with a unique idea.

An innovator may not be the person who thought of the original idea but the person who took that idea to a new or more useful level.

This week I am asking students to begin thinking about an invention or innovation. At this point, students should be busy observing the world around them, taking note of everyday problems that they encounter that could be solved with an innovation or new invention.  Students can work alone or in self-created groups of two or three. Over the next few weeks, students will be deciding if what they are doing is an innovation or an invention. They will complete a planning guide that I will share with them in Google Docs, draft a diagram of their idea using Google Draw, and finally they will create an advertisement for their idea using Comic Life. This is as far as the project in my class will be going. Ideally, this will inspire students to take their idea farther either now or in the future!

Here is what we will be using to plan our inventions: InventionPlanner

Here are some related articles worth reading:

Malcolm Gladwell on Invention versus Innovation – NPR

Where Does Innovation Come From? CBS News

Innovators Don’t See Different Things, They See Things Differently! CBS News

How Small Changes Can Produce Big Breakthroughs CBS News

Also, thanks to the Wallace and Gromit Cracking Ideas website for inspiration on this entire project!

For today’s staff meeting, I will be doing a breakout session on Twitter for teachers. I think Commoncraft does a great job of introducing Twitter so I’ll be starting with that.

The website about Twitter from cybraryman is full of resources for teachers but you can get easily overwhelmed so I’m going to focus on a few notable resources.

The Twitter for Teachers PBWiki will help my teachers connect with others. This is a first stop in looking for followers.

We’ll also be filling out this spreadsheet with our Twitter names! And, don’t forget to follow our ITC! @AvocaWestITC!

Our hashtag for today will be #AWTweets!