Month: January 2022

Community of Inquiry Framework

By Naowarat (Ann) Cheeptham and Carol Rees

We were thrilled to be asked to share the outcome of our curiosity-driven inquiry-based learning research project that was led by Dr. Carol Rees. Though Dr. Rees lives now in Ireland and is retired from teaching at TRU, she continues to be active in research and is still leading our team. Our team shares a passion for life-long learning community and creating curiosity culture between K-16 educators. In 2020, Drs. Carol Rees (Principal Investigator), Michelle Harrison, and Ann Cheeptham collaborated with Christine Miller (TRU), Morgan Whitehouse, Elizabeth deVries, and Grady Sjokvist from SD73 to apply for a Partnership Engage Grant (PEG). We were awarded $24,662 from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for our project entitled “Supporting curiosity-driven inquiry-based science education online through a community-of-inquiry partnership: rethinking pedagogical approaches during the Covid-19 pandemic.” Our team has also included Lorri Weaver and Hannah Allen as research assistants.

Fourteen science teachers K-12 from the Kamloops Thompson School District (SD#73)–Melody Steffenson, Hilary Villeneuve, Serena Reves, Amanda Straker, Jenn Filek, Laura Syms, Brandy Turner, Kim Lavigne, Chris Spanis, Sharmane Baerg, Courtney Bruin, Monica Bergeron and Lisa Galloway–and four TRU faculty members–Drs. Lyn Baldwin, Nancy Flood, Tory Anchikoski, and Crystal Huscroft–participated in the project.

To achieve our goal, we created a Community of Inquiry (COI) from middle and high school teachers and university instructors dedicated to sharing knowledge of their experiences and from the literature to support curiosity-driven inquiry-based science education online, face-to-face with social distancing, and a hybrid of the two (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). The COI was established as an online space, founded on the principle of three shared presences: social, cognitive, and teaching, established for participants by facilitators to create conditions to promote collaborative discovery and the co-creation of knowledge. In this one-year PEG supported project, the participants in the COI worked with facilitators from our research group through cycles of discussion, planning, trial in their own school and university classrooms, and reflection. Our research study was integrated into the COI so that findings from each cycle were brought back to the participants for the next cycle. In this way, knowledge was generated and built upon over the year.

Besides a conference presentation and a manuscript-in-preparation, a successful open learning resource (OER) was created and is now live for all interested teachers and faculty to access at this link: https://scienceinquiry.opened.ca/. The OER takes the form of blog posts from participating teachers and faculty members.

Reference:
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.

Photo by Seema Miah on Unsplash

by Mahtab Nazemi, Education

Over 15 years of teaching experience in K-12 and Post-Secondary combined have taught me a few useful things, to say the least. In my current role, working with Teacher Candidates (otherwise called Pre-Service Teachers), I have been very lucky to make my teaching practice visible as it contributes to my students’ and my own learning and improvement. It’s such a relief to be able to stop myself in the middle of something and exclaim: “Please don’t do what I just did! That could have gone more smoothly – any ideas of what I could have done differently?”

Recently when grading student lesson plans, I remembered a couple of important strategies that I would like to get back to consistently implementing. Like many conscientious teachers, I over-plan. I do this time and time again, even if it’s the fifth year in a row that I’m teaching the course. I know better. Every time I teach a course I have already taught, it still feels like a new prep. I re-plan because I want to do things differently all the time, and I want to bring in new materials, readings, and activities that I didn’t get a chance to use in prior iterations of the course. Because this is blog post and not a full-length paper, I will focus on only two strategies that have helped me, and I hope that they can help you with your time management.

I take notes on my lesson, right in Moodle. We all have an idea of how long something will take, or at least how long we hope it will take, so what about when it’s all done? So, here’s what I do in Moodle to help me with time management in the classroom. I will add a few lines about how the lesson went that day (and keep it hidden from students). I will write something like this:

• “This lesson was too long. Would be best to happen over the course of two
  classes.”
• “Cut this part of the lesson because they didn’t need this much introduction
  and background knowledge. (First make sure that future groups of
  students also already learned about this in prerequisite class)”
• “Next time, do a jigsaw activity for this reading. It’s super dense and long,
  but luckily something that can be broken into smaller chunks.”

If you’ve never done a jigsaw activity, but would like to try, here are a few more words about it. Oh, and by the way, it can work well in Mathematics class too!!! Assign this reading as 5 sections, assigning each random group of 5 students one of the sections. In class, have section-groups meet to discuss the specific part they read and feel ‘as expert as possible’ on that section. (If the reading or mathematics problems, etc., were not assigned in advance of this class, then this would be time for them to first read/solve the problems, then have a discussion about being an expert on the section.) Then arrange students in new groups made up of one person from each section – so that all 5 parts are represented in each new group. This second group arrangement will meet for longer than the first one did, to discuss the whole reading, part by part, now with expertise from each section.

With the above notes captured in your Moodle site, when you import this course shell next time you teach the course, you now have some self-assessments that will help you do a version of the same lesson, but so much better!

The second piece I’d like to mention, in regard to time management in the classroom, has to do with the “ordre du jour,” or the agenda for the day. If my class runs from 8:30am to 9:20am, for example, rather than having estimates for time in minutes, I include the actual time, like this:

Having the actual time, rather than the expected minutes, makes it much easier to glance at the clock or your watch and know that you’re on track for finishing all the things in your lesson within the allotted time. I know this might seem simple, but it’s super helpful! Even as a Mathematics teacher, it takes me too long to see 20 minutes in my lesson, and then figure out what time that corresponds to, and then decide if I’ve being yapping too long or if I’ve left enough time for the rest of the activities that day. Now relatedly, this is something you can adjust for future lessons, based on making a note (in Moodle or elsewhere) if something took more or less time than you had originally planned.

Hope these tips are helpful for you! If you would like to chat about this post, or any other thing related to teaching, please reach out.