IBL Unit 4 Post

IBL Unit 4 Post

This week the course readings introduced the three Principles that Support Student Learning:

·            Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the
world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

·            To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.

·            A "metacognitive" approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them (pp. 1-2).

Donovan, M. S., & Bransford, J. D. (2005). How students learn: History in the classroom (pp. 1-2). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

During this unit we began to look at the concept “in order for students to (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application." It is our job a classroom teachers to create goals, objectives, and learning activities that support the curriculum that they teach and link it with the process skills of inquiry, essential features of inquiry, and the abilities and understandings of inquiry.

We spent this unit identifying and describing the difference between facts and concepts, we compared and contrasted investigable and non-investigable questions, looked at how to turn non-investigable questions into investigable ones.

Facts:

Facts or definitions are isolated pieces of information. The focus is on verifiable and discrete details.

Concepts:

Concepts are over-arching ideas that clearly show the relationships between facts. They are frequently abstract.

The course readings have shown that these two terms are interconnected in the content that is taught to students. Essentially, facts are what students need to know in order to obtain an in depth knowledge of a concept and begin to use higher order thinking skills. Facts are used to uncover concepts. This is not say that there are not different levels of On the other hand, concepts are often seen as “big ideas.”  As such, they are often presented with "real-world" connections. Inquiry based learning generally focuses on investigations that are conducted around facts and students are asked to apply the knowledge that they have gained from those investigations to a new situation.

When planning for inquiry, the curriculum that is delivered does not always support inquiry based learning at first glance. We this unit exploring where teachers can go to see if the curricular goals that are being taught align with the state standards in Pennsylvania.  The interactive web-portal, Standards Aligned Systems, (www.pdesas.org) provides a resource for teachers.