In a time full of seriousness and worry, there is some humour coming out. In particular, the 1pm daily update has made it onto IMDB, the well known international website reviewing movies and TV series. Amusingly, it has 2 seasons and has a rating of 9.6/10! Therefore, here I bring to you an update from inside season 2 of NZ's Covid-19 lockdown!
We have made it through the first week back in lockdown up here in Auckland. The children have been amazing - the real stars of the show! We had 20 children show up to our daily google meet today and have had 31 active children posting, commenting and attending google meets. What a success!
Once again, this latest blip in the year 2020 has caused me to stop and rethink my professional inquiry for the year. After some consideration, I am determined to continue with my focus on children and their ability to think critically. The reason for this is that in many scenarios I am noticing how much our children could benefit from learning how to think deeper about their learning. Here are some examples from the last week:
During a google meet: During a conversation about food in Canada, one child ran to their kitchen and brought back a bottle of maple flavoured syrup. They confidently declared that they had some maple syrup. Here is an approximation of the conversation:
Child 1: "I have some maple syrup" [holding maple flavoured syrup up to the screen].
Child 2: "Miss West, I don't think that is real maple syrup."
Me: "Oh, why is that?"
Child 2: Because maple syrup comes from Canada.
Me: Can you think of any other reason why it might not be actual maple syrup?
[No response]
Me: What does it say on the front of the bottle?
Child 1: Maple flavoured syrup
[No elaboration]
Me: What do you think it means by maple flavoured?
From this point on, it required a lot of prompting from me for the children to be able to contribute to a critical discussion with causal reasoning. In a group of about 12 children, only 2 children contributed fully to the discussion. In this example, there were signs of one child thinking critically, however they struggled to elaborate, add causal reasoning and justify their critical thinking.
In other examples, when children were completing a task where they had to find facts about animals in Canada, many interesting facts were found however a level of causal reasoning/ critical thinking was lacking.
Examples:
"There are Polar Bears in Canada."
No elaboration. A response that could provide elaboration could be, "There are Polar Bears in Canada because Polar bears live in cold climates. Northern Canada has an extremely cold climate with snow and ice. Polar bears thrive in this climate and eat many animals that also live in this area."
"The marmot is the most endangered animal in Canada."
No elaboration. A response that could provide elaboration could be, "The marmot is the most endangered animal in Canada. This could be because of predators that eat the marmot or it could also be due to such issues as climate change or humans destroying parts of their habitat. To understand this more, we could look at whether temperatures have changed much in the area of Canada where the marmot lives or whether their habitat has been threatened by humans."
These are just examples. To get children showing this level of causal reasoning or critical thinking, I could create a causal chain template for the children to learn to use and work through when working on tasks. This causal chain template could be something to help the children when working independently. This will be important, particularly when we don't know how Covid-19 could impact us going forward.
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