CREATING A CLASSROOM COMMUNITY:

INQUIRY AND DIALOGUE

Week 8 Lecture Summary 3 March 2008

Why “Community”?

The emphasis on establishing communities of practice builds on the fact

that robust knowledge and understandings are socially constructed
through talk, activity, and interaction around meaningful problems
and tools (Vygotsky, 1978).

 The teacher guides and supports students as they explore problems

and define questions that are of interest to them.

 Students share the responsibility for thinking and doing: they distribute
their intellectual activity so that the burden of managing the whole process
does not fall to any one individual.

 In addition, a community of practice can be a powerful context for

constructing meaning. In challenging one another’s thoughts and beliefs,
students must be explicit about their meanings, they must negotiate
conflicts in belief or evidence, and they must share and synthesize their
knowledge to achieve understanding.
How People Learn, p.
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Students as Sense-Makers

How can students be helped to seek for understanding?

I would suggest that they need to be asked questions whose answers can be
'figured out' not by relying on memorized rules for moving numbers around but
by thinking about what numbers and symbols mean. They need to be treated
like sense-makers rather than rememberers and forgetters. They need to see
connections between what they are supposed to be learning in school and
things they care about understanding outside of school, and these
connections need to be related to the substance of what they are supposed to
be learning. They need to learn to do computation competently and efficiently
without losing sight of the meaning of what they are doing and its relation to
solving real problems.”

M. Lampert (1986) “Knowing, Doing, and Teaching Multiplication”

Cognition and Instruction, 3(4), 305-342.
 What ideas for creating classroom communities that focus
on understanding have you found in the readings, activities,
and other material for this course?
CREDE: The Five Standards for Effective Pedagogy

 Teachers and Students Producing Together

Facilitate learning through joint productive activity among teachers and
students.
 Developing Language and Literacy across the Curriculum
Develop competence in the language and literacy of instruction across the
curriculum.
 Making Meaning
Contextualize teaching and curriculum in the experiences and skills of
students’ homes and communities.
 Teaching Complex Thinking
Challenge students toward cognitive complexity.
 Teaching through Conversation
Engage students through dialogue, especially instructional conversation.
Teacher-led IC: Observe for kinds of assistance

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Class Meetings

Guidelines for Class Meetings

• Meet once/week at regular time (30 min 3-5 grade, 45 min 6-8 grade)
• Students arranged in a circle
• Honest/open dialog, focus on solutions
• Students don't accuse, put-down, or show disrespect to others
• No one solicits others to point out wrong doers
• Active listening (eyes, polite, hearing other side) and do not interrupt
• Use of I voice, "I feel this way when...[don't accuse] classmates tease me." not "Johnny is
teasing on the playground."
• Students lead (when skilled) to set up agenda
• Teacher final agenda arbitrator, but students could alternately facilitate meeting

See Donoahue, Z. (2001) ‘An examination of the development of classroom community

through class meetings.’ On the course webpage for Week 9.
http://www.teachingstrategies.com/pages/page.cfm?pageid=40
http://www.classroomcommunity.ecsd.net/
Theme-Based Inquiry Projects

 Theme-based inquiry projects fit the criteria suggested in How People Learn:
“robust knowledge and understandings are socially constructed through talk, activity, and
interaction around meaningful problems and tools”
 They also help to create community because students collaborate in working toward
shared goals
 Sharing and discussing what is discovered provides opportunities for Knowledge Building
through genuine dialogue
 Planning a culminating event, such as an Open Day or Parents’ Night, gives added
purpose and makes contact with the wider community

Many ideas for such projects can be found on the internet at:
http://www.project-approach.com/examples/projects.htm
http://spice.ees.ufl.edu/theme.asp
http://www2.edc.org/CCT/research_inquiry.asp
Essential Questions

 Essential questions spark our curiosity and sense of wonder. They derive from some
deep wish to understand some thing which matters to us.
 Answers to essential questions cannot be found. They must be invented. It is something
like cooking a great meal. The researcher goes out on a shopping expedition for the raw
ingredients, but "the proof is in the pudding." Students must construct their own answers
and make their own meaning from the information they have gathered. They create insight.
 Answering such questions may take a life time, and even then, the answers may only be
tentative ones. This kind of research, like good writing, should proceed over the course of
several weeks, with much of the information gathering taking place outside of formally
scheduled class hours.
 Essential questions engage students in the kinds of real life applied problem-solving
suggested by nearly every new curriculum report or outline curriculum standards such as
the NCTM and the Science Standards.
 Essential questions usually lend themselves well to multidisciplinary investigations,
requiring that students apply the skills and perspectives of math and language arts while
wrestling with content from social studies or science.
 Designing a Curriculum Unit for Unde rstanding

THEME
(A Way of Orienting Curriculum Content to StudentsÕLives and Interests
e.g. Community, Exploration, Water)
ÒBig IdeasÓ/ÓEnduring Unde rstandingsÓ
(see Curriculum Standards)
Activities
(that Allow for Inquiry, Dialogue)

Launch -----Questions -----Research ----Performance of Unde rstanding --- Reflection

Exploratory Mission to Mars

This curriculum unit took place in a grades seven/eight class in a school serving students
from minority groups that had traditionally been academically unsuccessful. The class
participated in an international project to plan a (virtual) expedition for the exploration of
Mars. http://www.marsquestonline.org/investigations/index.html

While, together with other classes around North America, they investigated important
topics, such as the atmosphere on Mars, the availability of water, and so on, this class’s
particular responsibility was to research the conditions on the surface of Mars and to
design the various types of vehicles that would be needed during the exploration.

They also had to create one segment of the habitat in which they would be living while
on Mars. Using heavy guage plastic sheeting, they had to make an inflatable rectangular
prism of dimensions length 3.5 meters, width 3.5 meters, height 2.5 meters.

In preparation, the teacher asked them to make a scale model.

Background

The class is divided into 10 groups of students. Each group has to construct a scale model of the
habitat that they will live in. The dimensions of the final habitat are to be length 3.5 meters,
width 3.5 meters, height 2.5 meters. The model is to be built to scale 1/10: 1 cm = 10 cm.

The teacher has bought a piece of plastic 4 meters long from a roll of folded plastic; if fully opened,
the sheet would be almost 3 meters wide, but it is packaged so that there are 4 layers, each 73
cm wide.

Problem

How can the 4 meter length of plastic sheet be most economically cut so that each of the
10 groups receives enough to construct their model habitat? What is the minimum number of cuts
necessary to achieve this? What are the dimensions of the largest piece that could be left?
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Recalling the quote from How People Learn -

“robust knowledge and understandings are socially constructed

through talk, activity, and interaction around meaningful problems
and tools”

What did you notice in the Marsville math activity?

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Further Ideas

Inquiry-based Learning http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic43.htm

http://www.edutopia.org/php/article.php?id=Art_631

Using the Internet http://www.biopoint.com/msla/links.html

Example http://www.smm.org/sln/monarchs/
 NEXT WEEK
PLEASE SIT WITH YOUR STUDY GROUP