Brian Oshiro - Encouraging Critical Thinking and Creativity

 Encouraging Critical Thinking

- How to get children creative?

- What questions are we asking our learners?

- Learner selected texts

- What questions do we ask? Bringing the text to life, are we engaging students? Or is it the continuous respond to text. 

Do you know what Climate Change is?

What are three causes of Climate Change?

Brian discusses the difference between these 2 questions, what one of these questions better assess' student learning? Do our learners know these answers?

The next question - Why do some claim that climate change is the biggest crisis facing this generation?

This questions gets students using what they've read and having to apply it to a real life situation, making connections.

This relates really nicely with extended discussion and how it is so important to have a great provocation.

What - Why - How!

Start with a what question (giving learners an easy engaging question to start with), follow this up with a why question, finish with a how question. Get your learners to defend their answers, how do you know this? Where is your evidence? Search through the text. Ask learners how they can solve a problem? They then have to synthesise information.

Ground rules for talk are so important. The provcation could be the best you've ever made, however, if the ground rules for talk aren't there.

How can we foster creativity and critical thinking in schools?

Are we giving students questions that don't just have one answer?

Integrate higher-order questions. 

This video is such great watch, would highly recommend.

How does this relate to me? What are my takes from this?

Look at the 3 step questioning, What, Why and How. Getting my learners to be more curious about different ideas, I understand that I will need more learner selected texts for this to work as well. In our podcast scripts I am going to look more at scaffolding the questions that my learners will ask each other and select those questions as a group, rather than being a group task, this will get more higher order questions that they will discuss, looking specifically at the 'how' questions.

If we can get students understanding the What, Why and How questions, the best thing would be during our extended discussions, our learners asking each other these questions, I will keep modelling this throughout our lessons.

Watch this space!

Mid-Term Reflections: Getting learners inferring more complex texts.

 2025 is flying as we are halfway through Term 1, all our testing is done and we are getting stuck into our learning. What I'm finding in my class is that my students are stuck on having a deeper understanding of the text.

The data - Priority Learners - These are my 2 middle groups that I'll be focusing on. These learners are Year 7&8, most of them can read fluently, they need to work on comprehending the text.

Looking more deeply into the PAT reading comprehension data, I can see that our students did really well with basic retrieval questions. However, our Year 7/8 cohort really struggled with complex inference questions and local inference questions.

Going back to my inquiry question: 

How might podcasting support the development of my learners' ability to engage in extended, meaningful discussions about a text? 

A big part of my inquiry is based around my learners having extended discussions. I was lucky enough to be apart of the RPI cohort last year where we were taught why and how to have extended discussions, you can see more about this if you scroll through my blog.

Moving Forward: Implementing Strategic Adjustments

I've been watching a few different Class OnAir episodes to help me get better at teaching extended discussion. I watched one of Rob Wiseman's episodes, one thing he did was give the students the provocation before reading the text, so they're able to think about it more and are ready to share when it comes to having the extended discussion. This is something I will try as I often find my kids haven't had enough time to collect the ideas they want to share during our extended discussions.

Another thing I noticed that Rob did, was that he had the extended discussion first and then had response to text questions following that. This is something else I'll try in my reading lessons.

The Podcast Initiative: Progress and Implementation

I'm having a lot of success with my podcasts, we've got to the point where my learners are able to use Google Vids, for filming and editing, they're starting to post these on their blog which is great. 

The KPE (Korero Pt England) blog is still currently being made, we can't wait to post our podcasts on this blog. 

Next Steps and Ongoing Development

To further enhance this inquiry, I intend to implement the following strategies:

• Provide explicit instruction in inference skills, utilizing modeling and think-aloud to demonstrate effective techniques.
• Use AI to create text and follow up inferential questions as independent and group tasks.
• Implement scaffolding strategies for extended discussions, including pre-discussion prompts and structured discussion formats.
• Explicitly connect the podcasting process to the development of comprehension skills, encouraging students to utilize podcasts for summarizing, analyzing, and inferring.
• Upon the KPE blog launch, utilize it for peer feedback, reflection, and to share.

Stay tuned to hear more!