This throws up all sorts of exciting possibilities for me as a facilitator and after the first session today I hope that the journey that colleagues and I have undertaken is a fruitful and rewarding one.
What is really interesting for me are the possible commonalities between disciplines. Hopefully we may arrive at some generic skills, cognitive approaches and ways of knowing that are transferable across subject, age and enquiries, and ones onto which tools can be mapped to further students metacognitive development. These words popped up time and again in today's session alongside phrases such structure content/process dichotomy, authenticity and engagement.
The above presentation maps out the first steps of our enquiry and it is my intention that the pathways for each member of staff through the enquiry should reflect their priorities in terms of their own practice. That said I hope we can do some pretty interesting and valuable things collaboratively. For instance one approach that is used in Japan is to attempt to plan the perfect lesson, and this opportunity to meet and collaborate in a fairly risk free environment could well prove to be a very powerful experience!
So today we moved through the first couple of steps in our school enquiry model, that is to identify the problem or question, then to generate and think about pathways forward in terms of research and action. Of course part of the point of doing these PEG is to affect some kind of change (thou art translated!), whether that be in the practice of the teachers involved, the learning of the students or even to develop a community of enquiry as a stance within the school.
With that in mind we did have liberty to skip to the end as it were, and treat our enquiry as a project (likened to me as an enquiry on steroids!) with authentic outcomes as described above. For instance how could we best share our findings with the rest of the school, what impact might it have in our classroom? For some of us there are academic outcomes with findings needing to be translated into essays for masters courses. For others this was welcomed as time and opportunity to look at and develop enquiry and enquiries through lenses which stems from their own priorities such as assurance of quality, level of structure or breadth of content. For me it was great to see such richness in the diversity of interest and possible avenues that may be opened up hereafter.
Once again I am heavily indebted to a Mr Darren Mead who helped me with the structure of this session.
I attach below some of the sketched ideas of members of our PEG from today's session:
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