Encouraging your students to talk could be challenging especially if you are working with language learners. I would like to share a couple of successes here. In both cases my colleagues and I planned carefully, divided the classes into groups and provided clear instructions and highlighted the importance of sharing and exchanging ideas.
Experiments
This week Miss Lisa's students were enthusiastically exploring friction and applied force.
The first session started with discussing the learning intentions and forming questions.
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| Miss Lisa talks about learning intentions. |
Our students came up with thoughtful questions about frictional force and applied force. To think about the answers and explore the forces, the children were offered to experiment with objects and surfaces.
The students formed collaborative groups and the active learning began. They had to apply some force to a toy car, a wooden wheel and a plastic reel on three various surfaces (carpet, floor and cloth).
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| Experimenting with various surfaces. |
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| Vincent, Benjamin and Nao Nao are discussing the data. |
It was exciting to observe our students learning together and asking each other questions hypothesizing and sharing their thinking about the results of experiments.
Learning About Area
Miss Erika's students got a task to use a certain number of manipulatives to build several rectangles and then measure their areas.
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| The students were working in small groups. |
The children were discussing the outcomes and asking each other questions. At the end of the math class, it was time to share their thoughts and findings about the rectangles.
Supporting the EAL students during the science and math sessions I noticed that even the shy students chose to talk and were eager to share their conclusions with the classmates. Teachers became silent observers and assessors occasionally pushing the students' thinking and/or providing feedback. The students actively learned from each other driven by the authentic interest and united by the common goal. It was obvious that all the children got much more out of that class because they have to practice so many various skills.
At the end of such sessions, teachers often summarize for students the outcomes and make meaningful connections to the learning intentions formulated at the beginning of the class. I wonder how challenging it would be for our students to do it independently and evaluate their own learning.
