Ignite Your Teaching

What happens when what you had planned falls short? This is sometimes a big fear for teachers that often prevents them from taking the leap with inquiry? So what do you do when this happens? Well, tonight I share just a few of my go-to back pocket strategies that I pull out when things don't go as planned to help buy me some time and fill up any gaps that might happen. What strategies do you use when things don't go as planned?

In this replay episode we revist a topic that is important to inquiry and that is knowledge builidng. Knowledge building with your students is a vital component of inquiry. But it is not a one way knowledge transfer from teacher to student it is a collaborative learning experience between teachers and students. Join me again as we review the important process that can be used to build knowledge with your students.

With a new year comes new year resolutions. Is it time to try something new? Every year I pick 2-3 things that I want to try in my classroom. With so many new initiatives and things coming into the classroom we cannot do it all. So I pick three areas that I want to focus on trying. This year there are three things that I want to try. What are you going to try to do differently this year?

Autonomy: the power to be independent and free; freedom from external control or influence. Increasing student autonomy in my classroom has led to - Classroom management is easier - The time I take to plan a lesson, or unit etc has decreased - I develop stronger relationship with my students - Teaching is easier - Students learn and retain more I know bold right…but it is true!! People ask me all the time how I do it. I teach full time, have three little kiddos at home, a husband I like spending time with, a TPT store, FB live…. etc. Do I sleep? Yes when the baby lets me…lol But as a teacher, I have time in my life for these things because I use inquiry and give my students more autonomy. It’s not working harder it is working smarter.

When I first started teaching the focus was on getting students to read and get better at math. For me, that was what my focus was on.

I didn’t really have a ‘writing program’ or really any structure to get my students writing and writing consistently.

Then there was this defining moment when I had my class list for the next year and I was talking with my teaching partner whose students I would be getting for the next year. We looked at my class list, saw that it was 2/3 boys and she began to tell me how much the boys from her room ‘hated’ writing and refused to do it.

This is a thread that I hear over and over….’my students hate writing’….’how to I get them to care about what they write’.

Fast forward to today in my room writing is the favourite time for the majority of my students. In fact, one group made me switch my workshop rotations because they had one day in the cycle where they didn’t have writing and this just didn’t sit well with them.

Now writing looks like

- highly engaged students who beg to write

- early finishers immediately start working on writing

- we think of ourselves as writers

- we love writing and seeing our growth as writers

So how did I get there????

These days every classroom has students with special education needs. This provides a unique set of challenges for regular classroom teachers. In episode 32 we look at the 6 guiding principals that I have which guide the decisions I make in my classroom to not only meet the needs of students with special education needs but helps to shape what teaching looks like in my classroom. It is these principals that allowed me to be more willing to adopt using more inquiry in my classroom. Do you have a set of principals that help you define what teaching looks like in your classroom? Listen to mine and perhaps it can help you clarify what your own guiding principals for teaching students.

In this episode we review the 4 different types of inquiry Modelled, Shared, Guided and Independent. We dive deep in looking at what each type of inquiry looks like throughout the learning journey from beginning to end. Discover how inquiry is more than just a project done instead of a test. Learn what inquiry can look like every day in your classroom as you apply inquiry strategies into your daily lessons. Grab the upgrade for today's episode. A matrix that outlines the four types of inquiry and ideas at each stage of learning. Use this to look at where you are in your inquiry journey and where you can go from here.

In this replay episode of Teaching with Inquiry Live we look at how to use the principals of inquiry-based learning to tackle the big ideas of Social Studies. Social Studies is such a big topic with lots of ideas that encompass ideas of history, geography and citizenship. We look at 7 tips to tacking these big ideas in a way that will allow junior students and their teachers to confidently tackle these big topics in a manageable way.

In this episode we talk about the widly popular 5E method used to teach science. We explore how this method integrates well with inquiry based teaching and how we can push the 5E methodoligies to really embrace inquiry based teaching. This podcast is a replay broadcast of the weekly Facebook Live Video show Teaching with Inquiry Live. This podcast now lets you take the show on the road with you so that you can easily listen anywhere and everywhere you go.