Monday, September 21, 2015

The Best Twelve Minutes.

It's not that the rest of the day today was bad -- far from it.  But the twelve minutes between 1:08 and 1:20 today were magical for me. 

 Audra teaches down the hall, and despite our full generation age difference, we are kindred spirits when it comes to autonomy and Inquiry Based Learning.  We chatted, commiserated, and shared student work with each other.  We know that Inquiry Based teaching is causing kids to be thinking in ways previously unseen by either of us.  We KNOW it is good.  We KNOW it works.

And we are clueless as how to to assess the kids fairly, without squelching their newfound brilliance.

Mind/Shift provided me with the perfect support for our argument today in their article, "10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom", affirming all that Audra and I have defined as the best way to get the best out of our students.

" To make inquiry-based learning work, teachers have to instead become experts at listening to how a student is thinking and then ask the one question that will “un-stick” the students’ thinking and set them off and running again."

Why yes.  My role in teaching is no longer instruction.  I am now a certified, professional un-sticker.

Who is still trying to figure out how to assess brilliance.  ( We see it, and it is blinding us!)

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