Thursday, November 28, 2013

Learning and teaching in the Inquiry Centre at AIS


I have had the privilege this term to be invited as a "guest teacher" to the Inquiry Centre in our Junior School, to collaborate on this term's storytelling unit with Year 1- Sequencing and retelling information, based around 4 fairy tales.
The Inquiry Centre is an initiative of Shane, our Gifted and Talented teacher, Darren the Digital Literacy Coach, and Denise, Junior School Library Co-ordinator. This year has been a trial at Year 1 level. Next year it will be expanded Prep-Year 2. A computer lab adjoining the Junior Library has become the Inquiry Centre, and like the library it is a colourful, welcoming, stimulating place.
It is such an impressive program, innovative in its approach and with collaboration, literature and digital literacy at the core. After student learning, that is!
Key elements
The planning is impressive, to say the least, as evidenced by the sample here. You may not be able to read it clearly but the detail and components are evident.
Collaboration takes place at all levels - students, teachers and classroom assistants, planning and teaching.
How does it work?
Classes are doubled up, two at a time, then divided into groups of about 7 children, using the key staff plus class teachers, classroom assistants and guest teachers (me! and other program leaders eg. pyp and school leaders eg. Assistant Head of Junior School). This is such a good strategy for buy-in for the program across the whole school.
While all the children are with Denise for a literature-based activity, and borrowing time, teachers for that session undertake some "just-in-time"ICT pd lead by Shane or Darren. For this unit, we were helping the children sequence a fairy tale, and retell it. We filmed it and created an imovie. So the pd each week was - how to use the ipad camera; how to frame/take good movies; how to use imovie; how to share to the cloud; how to guide student reflection; the assessment rubric.
I absolutely loved my involvement this term. It led me to wonder if, in a large library team like ours, we could take this model for collaboration and learn and share more from each other in a similar way, perhaps shadowing each other at certain times?
If you would like to know more about the Inquiry Centre, or would like to see the program in action,
email Shane Ross at shane_ross@ais.com.sg.

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