Inquiry Plan (3 of 3)

I have completed the implementation of my inquiry plan with my students and will be posting my video this evening. Due to some challenges at the school where I work, I was unable to video the lesson where I used the song about the average. Instead, I choose a YouTube video with song to present the meaning of percent. While the students where engaged, they were not quite as excited as they were with the "average" song.

After I had finished implementing my inquiry plan, I polled the students and asked them to write down which of the lessons included instruction that they felt helped them learn most effectively. The hands down favorite was either of the lessons that involved songs. Next was the pair grouping lesson. The least favorite lesson by a large margin was the lesson where they had to write how graphs can be lisleading. In response to my second blog, Professor Clarke suggested using different mediums on which the students can write their responses. I am going to try that suggestion and see if that makes any difference. I am willing to try anything to help my students not view writing as this huge, horrible thing.

Overall, I learned that anytime I can incorporate music and/or songs my students will benefit. I too will benefit because if the students are more engaged, there are fewer discipline problems. I took the insight that I learned from my inquiry plan and tried it with other classes. In one class, I offered extra credit points to any student who wrote a song about the topic we were discussing. These students asked if they coud "perform" their song for the class. Of course I allowed it and the students had a great time and this activity helped some of them learn the content.

Inquiry Plan (2 of 3)

I have continued implementing my plan in my classroom and some lessons have gone better than others. This comes as no surprise to me. For instance, the lesson where we talked about how and why graphs can be misleading, looked at a few examples and then the students were to write, in their own words, how graphs can be misleading did not go as well as I would have liked. For the most part, the students in my class hate to write and will try to get away with writing one sentence. Of course, I let them know that I expect much more than that from them and hand them their paper back.
The lesson where the students had to work in pairs to graph data in a bar graph went well. I picked the pair teams, using a mixed pair grouping. Overall, the students enjoyed working together and, judging by the resulsts, most of them understand how to graph data properly in a bar graph.