How I am engaging my learners in talk...

This week has been all about front loading so that my learners are able to begin forging connections to the content of our new learning. The screenshot of the blog post below reflects one of the ways we have done this. I was particularly drawn to her last sentence where she states that talking to her group helped her make connections.

We have done a lot of think-pair-share to encourage the learning conversations. By taking time to move around the groups I have noticed that everyone is actively participating. I reminded my learners that we learn best when we learn together and talk about our thinking. The collaborative approach removes the scary as the sharing reflects the ideas of the group and eliminates the pressure to take risks alone. 

As I have mentioned in previous posts, the scaffold this group chose to use was a 'go to' rather than a 'you must use'. Clearly strong connections have been made to this as they see by identifying the key words they are able to rework the words into meaningful sentences that summarise their learning.

Since woman's rights with voting was a big issue in the olden days, our reading topic this term relates to this with the upcoming election in mind. We watched a youtube video about the suffragette movement and wrote a 25 word summary on "what the suffragette movement was". I found this quite hard because it isn't a skill that I have mastered (summary) but talking to my group helped me make my connection.

 

To help me scaffold my learners towards evaluating their own contributions to the learning conversations I asked each group to do this today via the comments tool. It was interesting to listen to the negotiations taking place before the final comment was devised. Some as you can see were very honest. What I celebrated was the fact my learners were able to recognise their own contributions to their learning conversations. I see too that I need to scaffold what it is I want my learner's to notice so that they have the tools to strengthen their evaluations and identify their own next steps.