Kāhui Ako Achievement Challenge 5: Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/ key competency using symbols, languages and texts.
My Inquiry Problem/ Challenge: Children living in a digital world, where key competencies are essential, require ubiquitous access to cybersmart scaffolds and resources which are not currently available.
Hypotheses:
Highlighted in yellow are the hypotheses which I feel are most worth testing. Under these hypotheses, I have explained why I think they are most worth testing.
1. Having mixed ability groups would be effective in teaching cybersmart - provide student to student support where some children are the experts and some are the learners.
2. More explicit teaching is required, particularly in terms of how the children interact with others online. Over half the class could not respond to someone else's blog comment.
- This is a hypothesis that is based around the idea that explicit teaching is still very much required in teaching cybersmart. It is easy to hold high expectations of our children and what they can do because they are confident on their chromebooks. Sometimes we need to take a step back and explicitly teach what we think is the obvious.
3. Superficial areas of cybersmart are important, however children can still learn online without these things. Deeper skills such as interpersonal skills and critical thinking skills which link with the children's wider worlds and which link to the key competencies of the New Zealand curriculum are in fact skills which I now think are more important for the children to understand and be competent in at this stage of their learning. This was evident through analysis of the data.
4. Interpersonal skills (smart relationships) and critical thinking are two areas of cybersmart which could be connected more through teaching to ensure they are effectively addressed in student learning.
- These deeper skills which children can learn through explicit teaching of cybersmart are two skills which link together. This was really clear through analysis of the data, where children were able to write positive comments however the deeper level of thinking (that is, the ability to think critically through being helpful and thoughtful) was often a challenge for the children.
Research that builds on this idea:
- The Relationship Between Critical Thinking and Interpersonal Skills (Kathleen Holtz Deal, 2008) - this text looks at clinical supervisors however has some valid points which link to this inquiry.
- Importance of critical thinking: This text supports the idea that critical thinking and interpersonal skills are strongly linked in a NZ physical education context.
5. Connecting interpersonal skills and critical thinking through cybersmart teaching/ learning will support children to better understand the realities of information available online. That is, we need to think about how we can thoughtfully elevate the positive around the negative.
- This blog post from Fiona Grant (Manaiakalani Innovation Team) is a great explanation of the importance of turning the negative into a positive.
6. All cybersmart learning should use a consistent language based around the Kawa of Care document.
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