The 10 most important skills in 2020

This caught my attention today - an interesting summary. I'm currently in the middle of a MOOC about the assessment of 21st century skills and there's a lot of cross-over. One that particularly interested me was transdisciplinary - the ability to recognise connections and understand concepts across multiple disciplines. Despite this skill being repeatedly raised there are still very little school curricula that teach in this way. The PYP is one (although this method changes in the MYP and DP programs) but even if a curriculum framework favours this style of teaching it still takes a highly skilled teacher to implement it effectively. There are many PYP classrooms that still teach in a very segregated, discipline-based structure.

Source: Top10OnlineColleges.org

Opportunity and expectation

I thought I might post a couple of videos that have recently been doing the rounds o the web. Working at an all-girls school, with a focus on empowering girls and women, plus having two daughters of my own, these really struck a chord with me.

I've been thinking a lot about women's empowerment over the past few weeks. Its one of our school-wide goals for next year and we'll be discussing it with the senior leadership team when I return to work in August. At this stage I'm working with two words: opportunity and expectation. 

It's part of our role as educators to ensure that our students are exposed to opportunities that they may not have discovered on their own. These opportunities could be in specific subject fields such as science, language or maths, or in other areas such as leadership. Opportunity is not enough, however. We need to hold high expectations of our students and they need to hold high expectations of themselves. Hattie reports that self-reported grades - the teacher finding out the student's expectations and pushing them to exceed these expectations - have the greatest influence on student achievement. Once a learner has performed at a level that is beyond their own expectations, she gains confidence in her learning ability.

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on the empowerment of women - leave a comment if you want to be part of the conversation.

Why inquiry isn't cyclical

I just watched a fabulous video that summarises a lot of key ideas about inquiry. Although this is specific to scientific inquiry, I think the lessons are transferable to all other areas of inquiry.

What I like most about this video is the analogy of the cycle of inquiry being similar to a game of pinball. You do not progress through an inquiry in a linear manner. Instead you revisit, revise and retest ideas, questions and theories. The visual design of many inquiry cycles has lead to these sorts of questions being posted in social media forums:

 

In fact, last year Kath blogged about her own inquiry cycle in order to bust some myths relating to it.
 

The visual produced in the video includes some nice animation that hasn't been captured on the screen shot. Essentially its the grey arrows that play such a big role in this model. They rotate back and forth, in and out of the green circle. It aides to highlight the notion that when we inquire into something we're continually gathering and interpreting data, analysing outcomes, gathering feedback, exploring and discovering.
 

Perhaps the title of this post is a little misleading. There is still a cyclical process involved with inquiry, but it is important for us to remember that no inquiry (or writing) cycle was designed to be a linear, hierarchical process. It's messy, unpredictable and continuous. Check out the video for a more detailed explanation and some links to further reading.

 

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The Giant of Jeju - an inquiry into patterns

I'd like to share another teaching engagement that my colleagues and I introduced yesterday. We called it the Giant of Jeju and it is adapted from a lesson that the Maths Coach at one of my previous schools introduced to us.

I love the premise of this task. Its shrouded in mystery from the beginning and that seems to hook the students in. It also give them very little concrete information to work with so there is a lot of scope for inquiry and divergent thinking. We begin by showing the students a picture of a hand, telling them that a group of archeologists discovered this fossil imprinted into the Jeju terrain. Their role, as genetic researchers, is to predict as accurately as possible how tall the Giant would have been when it was alive. We aligned the learning targets with our mathematics central idea and provided guidance through key questions that were related directly to the task. Here's the summary that we provided the students with:

The Giant of Jeju by Dave Secomb

In Making the PYP Happen, inquiry in practice is characterised by a series of actions that could include: exploring, wondering and questioning; experimenting and playing with possibilities; making connections between previous learning and current learning; making predictions and acting purposefully to see what happens; collecting data and reporting findings; clarifying existing ideas and reappraising perceptions of events; deepening understanding through application of a concept; making and testing theories; researching and seeking information; taking and defending a position; solving problems in a variety of ways. This task requires students to perform many of these roles in order to solve it.

One of the best things about this task is that there is no single accurate answer. So even if two groups arrived at a solution that was similar, they still had to defend their findings and explain why their predication was more accurate than another. Several groups worked off premises that were based on flawed logic or showed no pattern. They arrived at answers that were vastly different from the majority and were found out when they had to prove their accuracy with reason. Some of these students were able to recognise this as it became clear to them while they were trying to explain their answers to the rest of the class. Those that still managed to arrive at solutions that were similar to others had their theories tested by questions from their peers asking them how they knew that they were accurate. Two or three groups had very similar (and accurate) answers but were unable to prove why their solution was correct. Many times throughout the year we've talked about the importance of process over product and this is a difficult idea for a lot of our girls to grasp because they have come from systems of education that value the opposite approach. This task helped to clarify to them why the process is so important.

Some solutions and reasons:

• 2.8m due to a ratio of 1:1.97. This is because we measured the length of our hand and our height from one of our group members. Then we applied that calculation to the Giant.
• 3.02m due to a ratio of 1:2. This is because the Giant's hand is twice the size of one of our hands.
• 2.66m because 9.5 of our hands make up our total height so we multiplied the length of the Giant's hand by 9.5.
• Arm length = hand length x 7. Arm + head + legs = height. So the total height is 4.86m.