Blog post #6 - Inquiry learning and mini-lessons

Inquiry learning is a meaningful and active process where students are in charge of their learning and teachers act as facilitators and mentors. Students formulate their questions, lead the investigation, and use appropriate research methods. They also develop relationships between data, use critical thinking to find an appropriate resolution to problems and generate new knowledge.

For my mini-lessons, I will use a project that requires students to produce a 3-part project that involves research, product production, and product presentation.  This is my initial plan to cover all the principles of inquiry learning.

Authenticity

Learning about the culture of Spanish Speaking countries is part of my Spanish curriculum, so as students research their country they will learn about their culture and traditions.

Deep Learning

The more you know about the culture, the better you can understand the language and the roots of that country, so when students create a product such as an electronic brochure, to share with other students, they need to summarize the information to its essential pieces. Also as they present their country to other students, they have to have to know as much as possible about their country.

Assessment

Students will be assessed by the teacher and the other students in the class. The teacher’s rubric will give detail instructions on what areas need to be covered by each group and will assess the research portion and the product that is put together. The student’s assessment rubric will be created by the students and the teacher as a group and will evaluate the presentation portion of that project.

Appropriate use of technology

Students will use Chromebooks to complete their research, and software products to create the pamphlet that they will be introducing to the class. One of the objectives of the first lesson will cover plagiarism, copyrights and appropriate sources, so for that, students will create a classroom-curated page of resources, using symbaloo or listly. Pamphlets will be created online using web 2.0 tools and they will be posted in student's portfolios set up on the Weebly platform.  

Student success  

Students will work with a partner to produce a product and develop an oral presentation of their product.

Connecting with experts

As an alternative assignment to the class presentation, students will have the opportunity to do an interview with a person for the country that they chose to study. They still have to do the research and create a pamphlet, but instead of presenting the product to the classroom, they can show the interview. In our school community, we have people that either came from or were born in several Spanish-Speaking countries so this will be a great way to use local resources to create life-learning opportunities. (If students choose this option, I will work with that group to develop guidelines to cover the material)

Performance of understanding

The pamphlet and the presentation will show the teacher and other students the amount of research and knowledge gather by each group.

Ethical citizenship

We will begin with the first lesson talking and learning about plagiarism, source citing and appropriate use of someone else’s work.

Lesson 1: Plagiarism and copyright. Using someone else’s work

Lesson 2: Curated resource page and citations
Lesson 3: Travel brochure and country presentations.