Collaboration + Inquiry = Perfect Environment for Integration of ICT

Image courtesy of:http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2013/06/163861447.jpg

For my blog this week I am going to share the success that I have had with collaborative planning this month and demonstrate how using inquiry has helped with the integration of ICT. Up until now have I have been struggling with how best to help teachers integrate ICT into student learning, but I realize that using the “Model of Inquiry” make it easy to implement and supports and enhances student learning.

When I took over the library just over two years ago my goal was to transform what was once an underfunded/underutilized library into a Library Learning Commons that supports staff and students, and also promotes collaboration and inquiry. Knowing that I needed some direction I worked with some district leadership staff, as well as some other librarians in my district, and we decided that we would use the Leading Learning framework to guide the transformation. I decided to narrow my focus on one area of the Leading Learning Standards: Facilitating Collaborative Engagement to Cultivate and Empower a Community of Learners. To be honest, I felt a wave of relief as soon as I narrowed my focus because I knew that I could not transform everything at once. I also think that I became more organized, efficient and better able to prioritize my time in the library.

I set out to try and establish new collaborative partnerships through the library. I already had continuing and healthy collaborative relationships with many teachers with whom I have worked with in the past when I was a teacher at my school. I was determined to try and reach out to staff that I had not worked with before. As a result, over the past two years I have had several collaborative relationships where I was nudging them toward inquiry, but up until this year had not had the opportunity to collaborate using true inquiry from start to finish.

Using the newly gained knowledge from this course as well as another I am taking, I reached out to a teacher that like me was really wanting to transform a unit of study into a true inquiry unit. This grade 8 humanities teacher was not happy with the traditional teacher-centered short story unit that had been taught the same way for many years using the same traditional stories. We started by setting up each student with a Google account and we decided to start using Google classroom to communicate with students.

We then began to plan an inquiry unit that focused on student engagement, was student-centered and met the learning needs of every student in these classes. I write about the process of curating our resources in a previous blog post. We used Stripling's model of inquiry to guide us through every step of this planning process:

Image courtesy of: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/tps/quarterly/inquiry_learning/images/stripling.gif

We also utilized our instructional leadership team to help us through this collaboration and they have been able to commit to supporting us through this entire process. Using GAFE has made communication and resource sharing highly efficient and effective. So with our unit collaboration team, our inquiry unit plan, our resources and our ICT we felt that the only things missing was the environment to introduce the unit.

Our collaboration team felt that we needed to use the library space and wanted to do something "outside of the box". We called our inquiry unit "Experiencing Story" and wanted our students to participate in "story tasting" where they would choose from a menu of short stories that were all online. They would have iPads that they would take with them and choose stories, in a variety of media formats, that corresponded to the different environments. We had 4 themes: Zombie/Horror/Crime, Relationships, True Stories and Dystopia. We then decided we would set up the library into 4 themed areas with props, food and a created atmosphere.  

• Zombie/Horror/Crime was set up like a spooky graveyard and zombie eyeballs and cranberry juice served in blood red cups were available to eat and drink.
• True Stories was set up like a coffee shop with tea and hot chocolate to drink, candies to eat and lamps, comfy chairs and blankets to create a warm environment.
• Dystopia was set up in a book room with space like candies to eat, glow bracelets, fiber optic lighting, a strobe light/disco ball machine and space music to create the mood.
• Relationships was set up like a romantic picnic with cookies, roses, chocolates and green foliage wrapped with white lights.

We really wanted our students to enjoy their experience so we did not tell them anything before the tasting and we only asked them to do the following on their iPads in google docs/google slides while they participated:

• You are a critic for this tasting and your task is to collect evidence of your experience. You can collect evidence on an electronic device, use voice to text, write notes on paper, take pictures etc. Try to include your 5 senses in your evidence. Jot down what you are feeling throughout this experience, as it will be helpful to you later.

• How you’re feeling about the experiences, the images, the text, the props, the food, the atmosphere. Can you go further and say why you are feeling this?

• You must sample at least two stories from each station. If there are different media forms (text,audio,video) available for a story, try to ‘taste’ them all!

We were very fortunate to have our 3 members of our instructional team with us to document the book tasting for 3 different grade 8 classes. They asked only a few questions and recorded their observations and the student comments that were heard during the experience:

Notes from Block A Students:

• “Hey! There’s hot chocolate!”
• “In a second.  I want to finish.” (Student pointed to the story they were watching and did not leave to get hot chocolate.)
• Student paused their story to take a picture of the station.  “This is the best.”
• One student checked all the story links first to preview the stories before deciding on a story.
• “I can’t believe it.  That ending.”
• “That’s, uh, an interesting story.”
• “Which one did you read?”
• “The graphic content one.”
• “I really like it.  I like that there are groups.  You can pick which ones you like, and you don’t have to read them all.”
• “Dystopia, here I come!”
• “I read the one that was hard to say.  I liked it.  The ending was good.”
• “Yeah, I DID NOT expect the ending.”
• “I’ve never done anything like this before.”
• “This story is so corrupt.  She’s cheating on both of them.”
• “It’s a love story… through dance!”
• “I can’t believe she went with him.  She was totally in love with the other guy!”
• “ I have a cousin who is transgender.”
• “Yeah, and you have a friend who is, too.”

Notes from Block C Students

• “This is really neat.  I get more out of the story.”
• “It’s neat to think about experiencing a story with more of your body.”
• “Yeah, the lights just add to the ambiance.  It makes you never want to leave.”
• “I really like the story.  I like how creepy it is.
• “Yeah, I like the ending when…”
• “Shhh! I haven’t gotten there yet!”
• “Oh, right.” (Student whispered to me so that the story wouldn’t be ruined for the other student).
• “This whole experience right now, I like it.  The different spaces - it makes it like you are in the story.”
• “I like the one from crime.  I can’t pronounce it.  I’ve never read a story where the main character is the bad one.”

Notes from Block D Students

• “I don’t understand why this is a song.”
• “Don’t you think a song can be a story?”
• “Yeah, actually I think you can tell a really good story through song.”
• A student jumped while reading a story and wrote something down on their paper immediately.  I asked what happened. “It was really shocking, this story.  I wasn’t expecting this.” Showed me the part. “It is just, like, super creepy. I am interested.” “What do you think of this experience?” “It’s good.”
• “Yeah, but I mean, like she said at the beginning, what does the experience make you feel?”
• “I think sound comes into play.  It adds to it.”
• “The music makes me calm.”
• “The lava lamp makes me happy.”
• “I’m not sure these stories are for me, but I like the atmosphere here.” (student then moved to another space).
• “I really like this.  There are so many short stories.  If you don’t like one, you don’t have to read it all.”
• “I liked it.  We could read what we wanted to read.  We could also be comfortable.”

After the students finished their two day “Story Tasting” we wanted the students to take the evidence that they collected and reflect on their experience. We decided that that we wanted students to using blogging as a way to communicate their learning throughout this unit. This would allow them to reflect, invite other students to read and comment on their blogs, to get teacher feedback and invite parents to read about their learning journey if the student wanted. Because we were already using GAFE, Blogger seemed like a great fit. I did a 15min tutorial and the students were up and running with their blogs.

Our "Experiencing Story" inquiry unit has already created quite a stir at my school as many students who were not in these classes have heard about the experience and want to know how they can have a similar experience. Teachers are also asking questions and I have a group of three teachers who want to collaborate using inquiry as soon as I am available, which is fantastic. I did not anticipate that this story tasting would be such a great way to promote inquiry and seamlessly integrate ICT.

Coming back to my goal and focus on Facilitating Collaborative Engagement to Cultivate and Empower a Community of Learners I have made some interesting observations. An interesting result of working on this area is that I am still able to see growth in all of the other areas of the Leading Learning Standards. So even though my focus was on just one area, it does not mean that the other areas were forgotten. In the above inquiry example that I have written about, I can also see growth in : Advancing the Learning Community to Achieve School Goals, Cultivating Effective Instructional Design to Co-plan, Teach and Assess Learning, Fostering Literacies to Empower Life-long Learners and Designing Learning Environments to Support Participatory Learning. This is so encouraging as well as inspiring for me because I so often feel overwhelmed because I know that there is so much I need to do to transform the library at my school.

This project has really made me realize the power of inquiry learning and collaborative relationships. I have learned so much in this course and through this experience and I am not even done yet! With my focus on collaboration and Inquiry I am able to incorporate the many ICT tools and skills that I have learned in each of the modules in this course.  I also feel that developing collaborative relationships with my community through inquiry has fit very nicely with this course. I know that this will continue to be my goal for this year and I can't wait to see how the rest of this inquiry unit goes. I also look forward to building more collaborative relationship within my school.

Works Cited

Canadian Association of School Librarians, Leading learning: Standards of practice for school library learning commons in Canada, 2014. http://llsop.canadianschoollibraries.ca/ (retrieved Oct. 28 , 2017)

Classroom 101. (2017). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=93&v=GIN-EtPa0lw