Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading/Writing Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List and other interested teachers
are joining together to explore the Writing Workshop and other ideas about
supporting young adolescent writers and readers. Juli Kendall, a reading-writing
teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion.
Juli also posts a weekly journal entry from her reading/writing classroom.
This year, Juli will focus on her efforts to integrate subject matter into
her reading and writing workshop approach. In her first
journal of the year, she explains the rationale behind this move and
some of her thinking about how she hopes to accomplish this goal.
Find out more about our project at our Reading/Writing
Workshop homepage. You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
If you'd like to join the daily discussion that parallels Juli's Journals,
find out how here.
2003-04 Reading/Writing
Workshop Journal
Week #30
Why Should We Teach Inquiry?
The other day, while reading email messages on the MiddleWeb listserv,
I came across this question from Heather:
How do you get others, those who teach in a traditional manner,
to see the value in inquiry-based/project based learning?
In other words, how can you create a "Shared Vision" in your school,
with inquiry-based/project based learning as the focus? How can you keep
this from becoming what DuFour refers to in the Journal of Staff Development
as "Collaboration
Lite?"
Here's a quote from DuFour that John Norton, our esteemed Webmaster, shared:
"Leaders determined to impact student achievement must
not settle for congeniality, coordination...or any form of 'collaboration
lite.' They must promote a collaborative culture by defining collaboration
in narrow terms: the systematic process in which we work together to analyze
and impact professional practice in order to improve our individual and
collective results."
Whoa! I spent this whole year focused on teaching content literacy to kids
and now I'm supposed to think about what it would take to get others at
my school to take on this project?
Yep. Someone let the cat out of the bag. So for the next few weeks, our
whole teaching staff (more than 50 teachers), at the direction of our principal,
is using the Inquiry process to research the topic of "Inquiry and
Investigation." My group is investigating the question, Why should
we do Inquiry? It's no small job!
To do this, I'm following my own advice. As I've said many times, "It's
the kids who tell us." Based on experience, I firmly believe that as
long as we stay focused on the kids and their work and the standards they
need to meet, we'll be able to make a difference in their levels of achievement.
What Jeannie is learning
In order to help answer our investigation question, I decide to take a look
at the Inquiry work for one of our students. Jeannie came to us at the beginning
of the year unable to move to middle school because she had not passed her
reading benchmarks at her last school. Since September, she's made amazing
progress and is now reading with understanding at the sixth grade level.
But how is she doing with Inquiry?
To find out, I take a look at her Independent Inquiry Project. Jeannie chose
to investigate the question What is the Life Cycle of a Star? Her
research started on May 4 as she used post-its to gather facts and questions,
as well as to make connections to her research question. Here's some of
her work:
Facts
--A star is a ball of gas held together by its own gravity.
--When a star is finally collapsing, it no longer has heat to support the
star against its own gravity.
--When the sun is dead, the earth will be like ice-cold night even in noon.
When the sun is dead, it will be a cold, dead, black dwarf.
--Stars that begin with much greater mass than our sun live shorter lives.
Questions
--How do stars die and who made the star? (Revised to "How do stars
die?")
--How do stars have their own gas ball held together by their own gravity?
--Why do we have black holes?
--How does the star have a life cycle?
Connections
--I made a text to movie connection about "stars have gravity."
I watched a movie and a girl had gravity because she was a witch.
--I made a text to self connection about "Star." My cousin's name
is Star and her sister's room has stars on the ceiling.
--A star can die like us when it is old.
--It reminds me about "shining." When everyone was at camp, not
everyone, well some of us were writing poems. I wrote about how the sun
shines through your heart.
In her Inquiry folder, she included Charts and Illustrations (as an "on
your own" activity).
--Jeannie drew a plan for a chart illustrating "The Life Cycle of a
Star" from birth to death, based on this NASA website.
--She also drew a diagram of a solar-type star (with a very large solar
flare).
On May 26, Jeannie switched to using a two-column t-chart to organize her
note taking. On one side she listed facts about "What is the life cycle
of a star?"
--Stars have a ball of gas that is held together by its own gravity.
--When the star finally dies, the heat goes out.
--The timescale for this to occur is called the "free-fall timescale."
On the other side of the t-chart, she wrote, "What I think" and
included these comments: Stars have their own gravity because it has
a mutual physical force attracting two bodies.
As I pour back over her research, I can clearly see how far she has come
in her understanding of Inquiry.
--She's moved from asking the "Who made the star?" kind of question
to questions that require serious Inquiry such as "How do stars have
their own gas ball held together by their own gravity?"
--Her connections to her research question show that she uses her prior
knowledge to develop understandings. She included text to movie, text to
self, and text to world (camp) connections demonstrating an unfolding ability
to connect to what she is learning.
--Her independent use of charts and diagrams to explain what she is learning
illustrates how she searches for what will help her gain a better understanding
of "the life cycle of a star."
--The multiple resources that she chooses to use (Internet websites and
search engines, her grade level science text, magazine articles, and the
school library) reflect her flexibility as a researcher.
Research on learning
In the book How People Learn,
Bridging Research and Practice (free on the Web), the authors provide
"a broad overview of research on learners and learning and on teachers
and teaching." One of the findings addresses Inquiry:
To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must:
(a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and
ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge
in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.
Reading this compact book has simply confirmed what I already learned from
Jeannie. "Why should we do Inquiry?" Because it's not about content
mastery but about how even students who are at risk of failure can use Inquiry
to learn grade level material.
So, Jeannie, you just keep right on reaching for the stars!
SEE Juli's Curriculum Map for Research
Projects - Unit 5
SEE Juli's new Resource List for Teaching
Content Literacy
Read next week's journal
Read last week's journal
Read Juli's backgrounder about her work
Back to Juli's journal index
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