Tag: agency

Eight Ways To Use the Understanding Map Right Now

The Understanding Map is one of the products of the work being done at the  Visible Thinking and Cultures of Thinking projects at Harvard’s Project Zero. It has been an integral part of the teaching and learning in my classroom since I first learned about it years ago.  Its universal applicability and relevance make me consider it as perhaps the one tool I would choose as a teacher if I could have only one. Regardless of age group, context, style of teaching and learning or discipline, the Understanding Map provides a guide to deeper understanding.

I recently introduced the Understanding Map to a group of educators at a workshop on concept-based teaching and learning, which I facilitated with the amazing and deeply knowledgable @gioia_morasch. Working with these educators reminded me of how lucky I am to have received training from Project Zero and how important it is to share the wealth.

The Understanding Map

This year, I have had the challenge of figuring out the best way of using the Understanding Map to support my Kindergarten students on their learning journey. I find that it is not so very different from how I use it with fourth or fifth graders. Here are some quick tips that work across the grades:

Eight Ways to Use the Understanding Map Right Now
  • Explicitly let students know that the moves on the Understanding Map are steps our brain takes to help it as it works to build understanding. Depending on the group, I may do this right away, or I may wait until they’ve heard me naming their thinking moves for a while. In either case, I remind them often why these moves are important. This continues until they start reminding each other…and they do!
  • Name the types of thinking the students are doing when you witness them doing it. “I notice that you backed up your idea with something you can refer back to in the text. Reasoning with evidence is one of the moves we use to help us make sure our understanding makes sense.”
  • Make connections between the map and what they know they already often do. In many cases, we start with wondering. This is often the easiest move for them to recognize in themselves. Further, by highlighting it as an all-important thinking move on the road to understanding, we encourage them to continue valuing that sense of wonder and curiosity.
  • I occasionally teach a minilesson to help the students understand what we mean exactly by a particular thinking move. It’s important to note that whenever possible, this is pulled from the thinking or actions of a shared context or the thinking of a peer.
  • Perseverance is key! Regardless of age, it can take months of consistently using the language and promoting the importance of a thinking culture in the classroom.
  • Parents are part of the learning community too! Share the Understanding Map with them and encourage them to use it when discussing their students’ learning at home. We use it at Student-Led Conferences as well.
  • Post the Understanding Map prominently in your room. With younger students, consider how you can incorporate visuals. At the start, it will serve as a prompt and a reminder for you. Eventually, you will find yourself referring to it alongside the students. Soon enough, your students will start referring to it independently!

 

Kindergarteners Lead the Unit Of Inquiry

Our second unit of inquiry in Kindergarten is “You’ve Got Messages.” We investigate it under the PYP theme, “How We Express Ourselves.” The central idea is “There are different systems to communicate and connect with other people.” The key concepts are form, function, and causation and the related concepts are communication, interactions and messages.

This unit is a well-oiled machine and has run in our Kindergarten for as long as I’ve been at the school (at least 13 years). As a part of the unit, Kindergarteners open a postal service in the lower school, which is always a much-anticipated event by the workers (our Kindergarteners), as well as the users (everyone else in the lower school). I was super excited to be on the “working” end of the service this year. I was also super excited to see how much I could get the students to drive their learning and how I could best facilitate conceptual understanding. Because, of course, #yestheycan

Invitations and Provocations

The Kindergarten team spent a lot of time making a plan and setting the stage for play and exploration related to our unit in our common area.  Complete credit goes to my amazing colleagues, as I was not even there the day they set it up. They put out displays and artifacts as invitations to the new unit. This included a message-writing center and the transition of the role-play area into a post office.

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I planned to use my student’s first experiences in the common area as an opportunity to hand control of the unit over to them right from the start. Experience has taught me that this would be much more successful if I did two things:

  • have clear questions articulated in my mind to guide exploration and discussion.
  • capture as many of the students’ actions and conversations as possible while they were playing.
Capturing the Moments

I have learned that capturing the actions and interactions of students, both with their learning environment and each other, is crucial to giving them genuine ownership. Over the course of an hour’s play, Kindergarteners are not always able to realize, let alone hold onto their noticings and wonderings. By recording as much of what I hear and see them doing, I can provide them with a record of their thinking from throughout that session. Students love it when we “catch” them purposefully playing and they love it even more when we quote them. This certainly supports their developing self-efficacy, which, of course, supports the learner agency we strive for.

In addition to building self-efficacy and agency, capturing the students’ actions and conversations ensures that I am building on what they are valuing as interesting and important to learn.

In this instance, I used padlet to record as much as I could of what I saw and heard as my students interacted with our unit invitations.

Made with Padlet

Teacher Questions

As the first experience playing in the common area was to provide the invitations to the unit, the questions had to be considered carefully. I planned a number of questions to help me be as prepared as possible to follow the students’ thinking, as well as to guide them to focus in on the unit itself. In practice, only two of my questions were necessary as the students had much to share. They noticed the connections to messages and eagerly contributed their ideas and wonderings related to the different types of messages and how they work.

The conversation was guided using the following:

  • What did you notice in as you explored the common area?
  • We are going to spend all the way until the winter break on a unit connected to what you explored. What do you think might be interesting or important to investigate, connected to what you explored in the common area?
The Kindergarteners Take Over
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As we processed our initial explorations in the common area, prior knowledge and experiences were surfaced, learning goals were established, and ideas were shared for ways to reach them. All of this coming from the students.

There were so many responses generated that we decided to sort them into groups and plan from there:

If you were to zoom in on the individual and groups of post-its, you’d see that there were many wonderings about how a post office system works (top, left). You’d also see quite a few wonderings about how to create and send messages, including an expressed desire to learn how to write the names of the people that the students wanted to communicate with (far-right). The third group of wonderings consisted of questions related to how people send and receive messages digitally, many of which were born from seeing their parents and older siblings on devices each day.

Ready To Learn

Once the students generated their initial wonderings and sorted them into groups, we let the kids know that they would have to help us plan for the learning. We asked for burning “Need to Knows” and for suggestions for how we could begin to investigate some of the wonderings on our board. Suggestions ranged from delivering messages in the school to learning how to write a greeting in writer’s workshop and quite a few things in between. Those are another blog post for another day but rest assured, every week we check in together, to see which wonderings have been addressed, which still need to be and of course, to see if any new ones have cropped up.