Today was our first full day meeting for 4SI and it was a productive one. Lorin, Christina, and Geordie shared their experience from Toronto. All of them commented on how they enjoyed the time to reflect on the process and to see how far along we are compared to other schools in the province.
Christina was affected by France Thibeault’s comment that she has been a principal for 15 years but has been standing still for 12. Geordie agrees that the 4SI process has allowed him to be a true instructional coach. We don't have a lot of time for this sort of development and we are all excited for the opportunity.
Dan Meyer is a name that keeps coming up, usually from me. What he is doing in Math seems to be where we want to go with Science and Canada & World Studies. Science has been going in this direction for a few years already but it is somewhat new territory for CWS.
We watched Dan Meyer's TED talk and it hit home. We like his method for developing student thinking. He removes the scaffolding from the task because learning how to identify what you need to solve a problem is an important step in the process. As teachers on this 4SI team, we are at that stage. We are trying to identify what we need to to do as teachers to help students have deeper engagement with the tasks we present to them.
I really like his approach that he call "3 Act Tasks". In this link he provides a 30 minute video where he demonstrates to a group of educators in the UK how such a task works. It strikes me as a very doable approach to teaching. It has student's curiosity as its primary assumption. I think it can be transferred to Science and CWS. At least that is our hope.
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