Innovative Curriculum Planning in Action:
The
“FUN or Bust and BUSSED!”
Learning Experiment
By Tammy
Jinkerson
An
assignment submitted to the Faculty of Education
In
conformity with the requirements for
PME
831
Queen’s
University Kingston, Ontario, Canada
February
6, 2018
In looking back
at my Module 1 post, I can see how shallow my original thinking was about my
own strengths, weakness and next steps in curriculum innovation. At that time, my reflections focused on
surface concerns such as lack of time for planning, over-reliance on
evaluations and checking-in with students to lead to micro-innovations. This course has offered the content and
experience I needed to really examine where I am doing well and where I am
failing to reach my true potential in teaching effectiveness.
Even though I regularly
teach classes and facilitate experiential learning, my job classification to
date is actually more aligned with counselling than teaching. As a counsellor, inquiry has proven to be
the single most effective tool in my professional tool-kit. In counselling, inquiry is about questions that
prompt examination of student motivations, aspirations and barriers. Solutions-focused questions empower students
and reinforce their right to choose, as they transition from being dependent on
adults to becoming self-reliant and self-motivated. Given this experience, you might think that
inquiry-based learning would be a natural fit for me, but I have come to
realize that I actually tend to abandon my counselling approach for a more
traditional style of teaching as I head for the classroom. This has been a revelation for me, being
able to pin point this as my greatest teaching weakness. Perhaps this mental trap is fear-driven, as I
find myself being overly aware of what I
need to develop, rather than what I already have to offer, a teaching role. I need focus, rather, on making incremental
changes over time instead overnight radical changes. I will also need to extend this approach to
my teaching practice by taking some risks and experimenting with approaches
like inquiry-based learning.
The
first obstacle I had to overcome in this project was gaining access to a group
of students. This is because I am
currently on sabbatical, the terms of which prohibit me from doing any
college-related work. I overcame this
obstacle by revisiting an idea I had last summer, which was to teach my 14-year
old daughter and her friends the life-skill of using public
transportation. Having finished their
exams, these students had a free day and were able to become my students for
this teaching experiment. Because I work
with experiential learning as my main professional context, I decided to focus,
instead, on the specific strategies of inquiry-based learning and how they can
be applied in experiential learning situations.
Having studied ‘gamification of learning’ in another PME class, I
decided to use Kapp’s ideas of adding ‘game elements’ to the learning process (Gamification
in the Classroom, [Lynda.com webinar] ).
My goal was to increase student engagement in what could otherwise be
seen as a dry technical process. In
order to make the experience more game-like, I created a quest for fun that I
called “Fun or Bust”, but then changed the name to “FUN or Bust and
BUSSED!” in order to tie into the public bus system theme.
I began with a simple observation:
rural youth can’t access public transportation. With this in mind, I
began to casually ask questions about how this reality may impact the lives of
these students. This worked very well,
as the students openly shared their conflicting needs, stating the need for an
appropriate level of independence and freedom, against the backdrop of adult availability
and willingness to drive where the teens wanted/needed to go. They remarked on how this kept them from
exploring part time work opportunities
and how they were not able to be as spontaneous as they might prefer.
We
began by brainstorming fun, economical places that we could access by using
multiple bus routes. This proved to be
difficult for the students, as the students explained that they are normally
not free to make such choices. Some had
used Uber in the past, and so I prompted them to consider where they would go
if they had an Uber driver for the day. The
students determined that they were motivated to go to the: pet store, community pool, all-poutine
restaurant, bakery and rival school to spit (yes, spit!) on their lawn in
misguided display of school spirit. The
common thread is that all of these stops would require active use and
navigation of mass transit. It was
interesting to observe the students looking to me to determine which stops we
should make, which gave me a good opportunity to reinforce that I trusted them
to lead us to fun and that I was merely like baggage they had to tote with them
on their quest. I explained that I, as their baggage, held
the credit card that paid for a modest lunch and activities and would help them
ask the right questions, of the right people, but would not provide direct
answers, making this part of the challenge of the quest. This lead to a bit of productive panic as
they realized that it was up to them to figure out how to use public
transit. I asked them to think about
questions they would have, if they were the only one responsible for getting us
to and from our destinations. I wanted
to set the tone, as indicated in Chiarotto’s 2015 publication “Natural
Curiosity”, in which the students felt the sense of being equal so that they
could feel safe in “revealing ignorance” through their questions (14). With minor prompts, they created a list of
the many practical questions they would have to investigate like: how to pay, how a terminal works, and how to
navigate bus routes. I must admit, it
took a great deal of self-restraint to avoid my old habits of ‘teaching by
telling’ and allow myself to become what the Ontario Capacity Building Series,
2013, referred to as the teacher being a“provocateur”, supporting the students
with their investigative process and extending their ideas (Learning-Based
Inquiry, 2).
What didn’t work
well in this experiment was how long I allowed for pre-planning and discussion.
These chatty girls got quite side-tracked with discussion while planning the
experience and I might consider imposing time limits to keep the proper pace. The other thing that didn’t work very well is
the number of students involved in the inquiry.
We were scheduled to have 7 girls in total but teenagers are
unpredictable and we ended up with just 3.
This did not lead to the level of confusion and group dynamics that I
had hoped to observe, but it did mean that each student was put on the spot to
really test individual inquiry and resulting understanding of the investigative
process. If I were able to do it over
again, I would have sent out more formal details directly to the students,
rather than relying on peer-to-peer exchange of information. I would further leverage gamification and
gaming elements in order to draw the teenage students into taking a risk by
participating and creating a more fun and whimsical promotion of the opportunity.
Another
area for improvement would be to allow more time to connect with big
ideas. The Galielo (n.d.) website recommended a
semi-structured question to have students make connections beyond the experience
into their real lives (Galielo Website).
I think that my prompt of “reflections… about our world, as seen on the
bus”, may have been too broad. I would
consider a new line of inquiry, perhaps “what community issues were observed while
taking the bus?”.
Our
“FUN or Bust and BUSSED!” learning experiment proved to be
a worthwhile inquiry-based experiential learning opportunity that put students
in an active learning mode while they co-created the educational
experience. This experience helped me
to understand, in practical rather than theoretical terms, the innovation that
is possible when I loosen my grip on the teaching process. It is also validating to have a pedagogical
framework that goes naturally with the grain of my existing counselling skills
and values. By making small adjustments,
the questioning skills in counselling can be adapted to support inquiry-based
learning for an enhanced teaching and learning experience.
Resources:
Kapp, K. (2014,
September ). Gamification in the
Classroom. [Instructional Video]. Lynda.com.
Miller, A. K.
(2015). Freedom to Fail : How Do I Foster Risk-taking and Innovation in My
Classroom?. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Ontario Ministry of Education. (2013, May).
Capacity building series- inquiry-based learning, 32, 1-8.
Chiarotto, L. (2011). Natural curiosity, a resource for teachers :
building children's understanding of the world through environmental
inquiry. The Laboratory School at
the Dr. Eric Jackman Institution.
Toronto, ON.
Galileo Educational Network [Web
site]. (2012). What is Inquiry?
No comments:
Post a Comment