In my journey to develop my classroom practices to explore Critical Thinking, I am supported at school by a Professional Learning team. We meet once a fortnight for an hour. Our school has scheduled it to happen within the timetable and our teams consist of teachers from a variety of subject areas. We are only 8 weeks into term and have met 3 times and already I have learnt so much from the conversations that occur in these teams. Here are two things my colleagues have shared that I think everyone should consider.
The first one came from a Design teacher who wanted to explore communication. They mentioned they were considering having a senior class to review the work of junior classes and provide feedback. A simple idea that for some reason had never crossed my mind. It provides an instant ‘real world audience’ for student work which automatically lifts the expectation of the quality of their work. So I tried it, I gave Year 8 a task and then gave their work to Year 11. The added bonus was uncovering the gaps in Year 11’s understanding. You can only give feedback if you have the knowledge to do so. Year 11 where instructed to give feedback on one thing they liked and one thing that could be improved. I returned it to Year 8 along with the feedback. The students readily interacted with the feedback applying themselves to improve their work. This may have been the most effective thing I can do in my classroom;
student time spent addressing feedback is some of the most valuable time they will spend (Lucas, B. and Spencer, E., Pedagogy for a Changing World Teaching Creative Thinking, p81, 2018)
The second nugget was just this week and again came from a Design teacher. This time the context was how to develop true collaboration. I love this idea as I think it is important to break the notion that group work is necessarily collaboration. I have seen plenty of group work products prepared by just one individual group member with no collaboration evident. So what was the idea? Simple, reverse the think-pair-share protocol. Again a simple idea that is easy to implement. The idea is that once a problem is presented to or developed by the class, start by placing the students in groups of 3 to share and develop ideas. Then after a suitable amount of collaboration time where students discuss ideas, change it up and put them in groups of 2 (with a different person) to again share and reflect. The final step is for students to develop their solution individually. The thing that strikes me about this is that there is no where to hide in an individual solution. They have had the opportunity to collaborate and share ideas, get feedback and refine their thinking and now have to do the work themselves. Again I took this straight back to my classroom, we have done the 3 and the 2 and I am looking forward to see what the individual work looks like.
What I like most about these ideas is their simplicity. They took almost no prep time. The added bonus is that both of them are pedagogical practices that address key content and skills in my subject area as well as developing key competencies of Critical Thinking and Collaboration in my classroom.
What have you learnt from in school Professional learning this year? I would love to hear about the ideas of your colleagues that are transforming your teaching.
Critical Thinking 