Starting the January, the Grade 1 class has been following students’ authentic questions and deepening their explanations of issues related to whether all water is connected, how life on earth came to be, and the water cycle. During Knowledge Building circles we took minutes to record students’ ideas for continual improvement and to help us reflect on the speaking turns of the students, how deep they went, and promising next steps that popped up from the students. The students took responsibility to introduce new ideas/questions to the community and contributed diverse and improved explanations of the ideas. They were able to connect knowledge learned from elsewhere such as the library, YouTube videos, and television shows, to their study. Idea improvement is salient in their discourse. The teacher listens to see if the students are still on task when many simultaneously being to talk to classmates sitting nearby during a discussion. The students are also asked to summarize their learning when there are visitors to the classroom.
Zoe Donoahue, Gaoxia Zhu