Spiral of Inquiry Reflection

Term 4 Reflection

Now that it's the end of Term 4, it's a time to reflect and ponder over how our 'Spiral of Inquiry' has gone. Questions to ask are:

• What was our plan?
• What did we change?
• Did we do something different?
• How did we test our hunch?

At the beginning, we were guided to consider Halbert & Kaisers' view on developing hunches:

"It involves getting deeply held beliefs and assumptions out on the table. It doesn't involve a general brainstorm of all possibilities."

As a team, we identified that many of the learners were not able to ask deeper questions and lead their own learning.  This was very obvious with our many ELLs.  We wanted our iExperiences to raise the Curiousity within each learner - with the utopic outcome being a learning habitat filled with questioning learners.

Our Plan

With the addition of learners from LH4 (including two learning coaches), it was also decided that we would buddy up Learning Coaches for each iExperience - resulting in an additional factor in our inquiry.  Our wondering was whether a variety of co-teaching methods (in rotating pairs) would have a greater impact on the questioning and learning of our ELLs.

The Outcome

Working alongside another Learning Coach during the iExperiences was an excellent way to explore the different team teaching methods.  

On some occasions I was involved in using the 'team teaching' method, but this was only successful if we had either planned together, or had a similar understanding about the experience taking place, e.g. the 'Scratch Junior animation' experience with Michael and the 'hair raising' experience with Michelle.   I felt that when this happened, more learners asked questions because there were two coaches who were able to support them and ask the learners deeper questions.   

Other times I was involved in the 'one teach, one assist' method.  With this method, I felt that the learners were not always engaging in the experience enough to initiate deeper thinking and this was because the learning coach who was supporting me had not been involved in the planning process or had not read/understood the iExperience design beforehand.   This problem was also evident when placed with a reliever, instead of the planned learning coach.

Other factors that impacted on the outcome of our inquiry were:

• disruptions to our iExperience timetable due to other events going on during Term 4
• little understanding of the iExperiences that other learning coaches had designed so I was not able to follow this learning through into our iExplore time and develop further discussions and questioning

What would I do differently?

Firstly, I would like to have time designated for designing the iExperiences together and if my partner was unable to meet, then we would agree on another day/time to meet and design together.

I would also like to have the opportunity for each partnership to present their iExperience with the other teams so that we had a good understanding of what our learners would be learning so that we could utilise this learning during iExplore to prompt, questions and delve into deeper wonderings. 

We often hear that questioning is an innate characteristic of children, but perhaps sometimes when the learning taking place is requiring higher order thinking, especially for the ELLs, then they may have benefited from having us role model wondering and questioning; and together co-constructing a learning habitat filled with curious and questioning learners - our utopic outcome.