THINKIES
broadening our understandings
PERSPIRATION
INSPIRATION
DESIGNING
THINKING
QUESTIONING
a Deep Question: Why do rights and responsibilities always co-exist?
What's all this for?
What's it for?
For individual students, for groups, for whole classes, for enrichment, and for gifted students or pullout programmes. Why? We realise the need to provide dfferentiation for learners - offer them CHOICE, COMPLEXITY, and CHALLENGE. We want learners to be engaged, enthused, and fired up!
How?
We use our own synthesis of several teaching strategies/models to engage students in their learning; e.g. Understanding By Design; SOLO taxonomy;
Sternberg, Inquiry with Concepts, Robert Ennis, Habits of Mind, H Lynn Erickson...
And, we COMBINE this with using laptops, or a tablet, or an iPad, or even an iPhone, so that students are using the technology to actually build and learn, not just as an "add-on" to the curriculum.
First we choose a CONCEPT which then focusses on our Big Understanding.
We form our own Big Questions as we go along and as our understandings increase. Learning to question is SO important!
The underpinnings for individualising with our THINKIES packages, for offering higher-level-thinking is the use of Bloom's Taxonomy (see PLAN with Bloom's button) as well as knowing our learning styles and preferences, to investigate, ponder and wonder.
Individualised learning allows for students to have choice, complexity and challenge- we think it's the best way to engage young minds!
And what about assessment?
Assessment will be based on each student's demonstration of understandings through their very own WIX websites (see on PORTFOLIOS page) and there are several optional Assessment sheets also, in the Teachers' Package of pdfs.