RPI Day 7 - Critical Thinking

Today I was lucky enough to have a 1 on 1 session with Naomi as I've just finished my 5 week travels across Europe!

 

I found this day really interesting as Critical Thinking is one of the most important aspects for kids to comprehend and analyse a text and make their own opinions based of what they're reading.  

Naomi spoke in depth about making sure we think more deeply about the text.  For this to happen, we as teachers need to plan and think about ways that are going to get our learners thinking deeper about the text. When we spoke about this, one thing I thought about a lot was creating my provocations for our extended discussions, making sure that my learners could have deep conversations about the theme/idea from the text.

This is an example of how we can get our children thinking critically when doing their follow up activities. This was an activity that Naomi asked us to create for our learners to use in their follow up which will get our learners thinking more critically about the text.

I really enjoyed this session, we were able to have really good discussion about how to get our learners critically thinking with the teacher and during their follow up, I was so grateful that we were given a huge resource to help us make this happen!

Thanks heaps for today Naomi!

Update on our Extended Discussion - Our extended discussion in our classroom is happening and going well.  After multiple talks with my team leader (Rob Wiseman) I noticed that I wasn't being explicit enough with the expectations before our discussions.  I'm making sure before every lesson we go back to the ground rules for talk and make sure that I'm always referring back to these, I also talk about what our goal was that we had for this lesson, based around the ground rules for talk, this has been great as it reminds our children to focus on a certain aspect in the discussion.