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Expert Corner: Fostering Inquiry through Effective Questioning Educator of the Month: Carla Hogar
Expert Corner:
Laura Chervenak has been with ExploreLearning since 2010 as the VP of Professional Development. She has taught high school science, and is the founder and former director of GOAL Digital Academy. Laura is National Board Certified in Science/Adolescence and Young Adulthood, with a B.A. in Zoology and an M.S. in Anthropology. Inquiry learning centers around exploration, asking questions, and building understanding of the concept at hand. Teachers' good questioning strategies support the work students are doing in the classroom by arousing curiosity and motivating students to seek out new knowledge. Effective questioning in an inquiry classroom follows several key principles: 1. Plan questions ahead of time that will support inquiry. 2. Ask questions in ways that include everyone. 3. Give students time to think. 4. Avoid judging students’ responses. 5. Follow up students’ responses in ways that encourage deeper thinking. Find out more about each of these principles and examples in my full essay on our blog. As you work on building your own questioning skills to support inquiry, set incremental goals for yourself and monitor your progress against those goals. Don’t try to master everything at once! For example, begin with improving your wait time after asking a question. Once you have mastered wait time, you can work on eliminating judgmental comments to student responses, and then asking more questions from the higher levels of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. To monitor your progress, you can videotape your inquiry lessons and analyze your question types, wait time, or other metrics for effective techniques. If a video camera isn’t available, ask a colleague to observe a lesson and collect data on your current questioning goal. Because teacher questioning is key during whole group instruction, ExploreLearning provides great questions at various levels of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy in our Student Exploration Sheets included with almost every Gizmo. Teachers can also refer to the Teacher Guide discussion questions and even the assessment questions for more inspiration. To see a demonstration of the power of good questions with a Gizmo, watch our video, Teaching with Gizmos: Function Machines.
Educator of the Month: Carla Hogar Carla Hogar teaches math and science to grade 5 and grade 6 students in a level 9 NANS school in Québec. She studied Elementary Education at McGill University. She has been teaching for six years and has taught abroad. With international teaching experience, Carla Hogar has seen a broad variety of learning and teaching resources. Two of her favorite are Reflex and Gizmos. With ExploreLearning's best-of-breed products, “learning is interactive and students can explore concepts on their own, so learning isn’t so teacher-directed. Also, Gizmos and Reflex take pressure off the teacher because you don’t have to develop extra materials.” In Carla’s math classes, she uses stations. Her stations include Reflex on laptops, a strategy station, and a manipulative station. Students travel between stations, spending fifteen minutes at each. Carla shares, “The students really enjoy the Reflex station, and they just get so excited to go on it. It’s not like I am throwing them in front of a website that throws facts at them. They can play games, they can purchase things, they are intrigued... and they are learning at the same time! Even with students that have demonstrated mastery, I just find that I have such smoother classes because they already have the facts in mind.” She is working on including Gizmos as part of her math stations soon, too. In Carla’s science classes, she uses Gizmos that complement each of the themes she teaches. Once she selects an appropriate Gizmo, she models how to use it. She explains, “All the kids sit in front of the interactive whiteboard and experiment together for 5-10 minutes.” Then she lets the students work independently. “For younger grades, they explore the Gizmo in pairs, for grades 5-6 they do it on a laptop and complete it on their own.” In addition, if the vocabulary is too difficult for some of her students, she says “it’s easy to change because all the Gizmo Lesson Materials are customizable,” which is great for her English Language Learners. Although she is in an Anglophone school board, she still has many bilingual students primarily from French speaking families. “ESL students have special requirements,” she explains, and “Gizmos are able to bridge the gap in vocabulary.” One of her students’ favorite Gizmos is the Weight and Mass Gizmo because they can compare the weight of objects on earth and measure the mass of objects on different planets including a pumpkin, a flower pot, a baseball, and even a puppy. “They really like that part, and I like that it’s a cross-curricular concept.” Carla is always sharing new Gizmos with fellow teachers because the simulations are “such great tools that go along with our curriculum guidelines. It is not like Gizmos are something extra, they complement what we’re supposed to be teaching.” Carla is always looking for new and exciting ways to integrate Gizmos, and shares, “as with any good teacher, I am always in the process of learning and improving my practice.”
Lesson Material Updates Gizmos are a great way to provide conceptual understanding of complex mathematical concepts. Check out these interactive mathematics Gizmos that just received updated Lesson Materials. • Integers, Opposites, and Absolute Values • Circles • Least-Squares Best Fit Lines • General Form of a Rational Function In the Addition of Polynomials Gizmo, students use tiles to model and add two polynomials of the form ax2 + bx + c. The Gizmo provides feedback for incorrect steps, and the randomized problem generator allows for unlimited practice to support mastery. Also, check out the User Lesson Materials from members of the Gizmos community. Kathleen Kaplan submitted a lesson plan for the Addition of Polynomials Gizmo that includes a real-world problem involving the distance between jets, where students will need to subtract polynomials.
Stay in Touch If you want to comment on any of the information in this newsletter, be sociable and post your insights on the Facebook pages for Gizmos and Reflex. And as always, if you have a question or comment about Gizmos or Reflex, don't hesitate to contact our Customer Support team using the support form for either Gizmos or Reflex. We would love to hear from you. For information on bringing Gizmos and Reflex to schools in your area, contact your ExploreLearning Account Representative:
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