Educating the Dragon

With ‘no fixed abode’ I have come across one major draw back; the issue of my ongoing Professional Development.

As scathing as I have been in the past regarding the value placed upon my own ICT PD (It being one of many, many foci) I am now in the rather unique position of having NO PD outside my ICT focus. This has come about by me not being attached to a particular school for half the school year, and now having the majority of my teaching in a school with very little left in the PD budget.

So I have taken the bull by the horns and ‘affiliated myself with the school I teach at on Wednesdays and went along to my first ESAS (Inquiry Learning) session this week.

ESAS officially stands for ?????? none of the teachers I asked could tell me.

Emily effectively introduced and directed us through the “Sharing circles” – 42 of us into 4 groups.

Here are some rough ideas and notes from my time with them.

Before we broke into groups a helpful list of purposeful ‘rules’ for sharing were discussed and I figured that I might just use them for when I am introducing “Thinking Buddies” next week to help students open up and share their ideas with each other.

Purposeful Sharing

Deep Respect

Light Spirit

Inquiring questioning

Non judgmental

Affirming

and Confidential

Emily spoke at some length about each of these but I couldn’t keep up. Having said that I feel they all speak clearly enough for themselves.

Typing in Inquiry Unit into Google (apparently) is not a bad place to start. It’s where one staff member found the link to Wanganui ICT cluster . There are a great number of helpful templates their all adaptable for the general Inquiry Learning process.

There are a key key features in the Inquiry process

Provocation – This is the catalyst event or statement that gets the ball rolling, the two examples given in our session were “Art- Just a pretty picture?” and “Is all rubbish really rubbish?”

There should also be Big Questions which give the Inquiry purpose and direction.

Some teachers found that they had to generate a large number of the question for the Tuning In portion of the Inquiry, so that the students where able to get on the right track for the Inquiry and tangents were minimized.