Task: Present findings from this inquiry about your teaching. Ensure qualitative data includes rich descriptions of your teaching and quantitative data is clearly presented.
Hypothesis: A focus on critical thinking and causal reasoning when responding to texts will support increased levels of critical thinking and ability to create causal links in online written interactions with others for year 5 children reading between 10 and 12 years.
Observation Process: Yesterday, Clarelle Carruthers came to observe me taking a reading lesson. She used the same observation sheet that I used for my self assessment last week and the observation was on a lesson using the same text but with different students.
Findings:
The findings from this observation really confirmed that from my self assessment.
I often rephrase my questions directly after asking it. This could add more confusion than just asking the questions once and then giving the children time to think about it before answering.
Examples:
- Teacher: What page are we going for?
Student: 38
Teacher: How do we know that?
Student: Contents page.
In this example, instead of asking the two questions, I could have asked the first and the children could still have added their reasons for knowing that. By asking the second question ('How do we know that?'), I was supplying the deeper level of thinking for the children. Here is another example of this:
- Teacher: What is it [the text] about?
Students: Water shortage. Earthquake, drought.
Teacher: How do we know that?
Student: There is not enough water.
The children were able to make causal links with prompting from a question:
Exampe:
- Student: Maybe because it might lead to the ocean and the ocean might become more polluted than it is now.
Student: The ocean leads to the sewers which lead to our taps.
Student: We share our water with the entire world and if we pollute it other people might have to drink that.
This suggests that the children are very capable of creating their own causal links and are able to be critical thinkers. I just need to allow them to be able to do this without stepping in too soon. I need to teach them to be able to make connections between two ideas without prompting them with suggestions of how to get there - a bit like getting from A to B on a car ride without any help.
Right at the end of the discussion, one of the students asked a question: "What about car washes?" This was the only question in the whole lesson. I had a lot of thoughts about what this question suggested about my teaching practise and the children's learning:
- The question was not formed in a way that would encourage responses from others. As the teacher, I automatically understood what the child was asking, however I don't know if the children would have. It would be good to teach the children to pose a question like this as: "So, if we wash a car on the road and water goes down the drain to the ocean, does the dirty water go down a drain directly to the ocean at a car wash?"
- I asked myself why a question was not asked until the end of the lesson. Was this because I was not allowing children opportunities to ask questions? Was it because it wasn't until then that children felt they had enough information and specific vocabulary to be able to ask a meaningful question? Interestingly, a similar thing happened in the self-observation lesson, where the first meaningful question/statement that was made independently did not occur until right at the end of the lesson.
Like detectives that try to solve a crime, we need to be teaching the children the skills to be able to fill in the gaps. Detectives will often have an idea about how or who is involved in a crime they are trying to solve. They also usually know how the crime ends. However, what they have to piece together is the bits in between. They have to use clues to get there and there is no one prompting them along the way to get there.
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