Transcript for:
Exploring Shared Inquiry in Education

hello everyone and welcome to shared inquiry and dialogue part two i'm dr williams and i'll be building off of our foundational knowledge of shared inquiry and dialogue and building on that in this video so again i just want to kind of review with you what we discussed previously about shared inquiry and dialogue so it's important to note that differences shape who we are and what we know life history society and power cannot be understood from a single perspective we need multiple viewpoints to truly see the world from all angles in all backgrounds because of this inclusive classrooms must function as a learning community built on shared inquiry and dialogue dialogue is more important than a conversation that is very important here to understand the difference between a dialogue and a conversation it is also different than a debate in which someone wins and someone loses dialogue requires openness to new ideas in a collective learning this is not an easy practice for students and for teachers to engage in dialogue they must build and exercise specific skills and let's talk about what those skills are in order to get to true dialogue within your classroom so you actually need skills in order to engage in a dialogue so the first one is listening this is deeply listening to what others say and to the feelings experiences and wisdoms behind what they say so it's not just listening to respond to them it's listening to think about what they have to say to think about their perspective and to maybe learn something from it so it's taking that listening it's an active listening it's a deep listening humility recognizing that however passionately we hold our ideas and opinions and we think that we're right other people may hold pieces of the puzzle that we don't so we bring to a dialogue a humility that maybe we have something else to learn from someone else no matter how passionate we are about that topic respect this is where we trust the integrity of others believing that they have a right to their own opinions even if they differ from your own and valuing that other person enough to risk sharing your ideas with them so that's truly what respect is trust building a safe space to explore new ideas and work through conflicts controversy and painful moments that it may arise when talking about issues of maybe injustice and oppression so we have to build that classroom culture of trust so that you know students feel like we trust them they feel safe and they trust us with the information that they're speaking about their background personal um things that they put out there in our classroom voice speaking the truth as we see it and asking questions about things we don't know or understand particularly on topics related to identity power and justice and having a voice means you know we're you're going to see some students that don't feel like they have a strong voice and they have lots of questions but they don't have the confidence and their voice to ask those questions because they feel like it would make them maybe look dumb or stupid or insecure and they don't want to come off as that and so they don't have a voice in your class and so this is all needed listening humility respect trust and voice are all needed and all need to be built inside your classroom culture in order to truly get dialogue from your students not a debate not a one-on-one where the teacher says everything or asks all the questions or you know it's teacher-centered we need to move back towards that student-centered and in order to do all that and get that dialogue that we want from them we have to have these built into our classroom cultures so i want to remind you it's important that we always connect our work back to anti-bias instruction and education because we want equity in our classrooms where we can allow all students in our classes to achieve success and so how does shared inquiry and dialogue connect to anti-bias instruction well it supports two of the four domains so it supports diversity and action so building skills necessary to explore multiple perspectives fosters a critical thinking within our students complex textual understanding and appreciation for diversity so being able to truly get to that dialogue allows them to reach a critical thinking level in order to dive deeper and understand different people's perspectives within the classroom and it really actively combats like that diversity issue that may arise dialogue also supports active listening respectful sharing and conflict resolution a culture of shared inquiry offer offers a lived example of meaningful collaborative work and a model for community building so i want to transition to you know we have the dialogue and i really want to focus on shared inquiry right now and i want to talk about the importance of a good question so a good question can open a mind shift paradigms within people force an uncomfortable but transformational cognitive dissonance that can help create thinkers so basically what a good question can do is it it makes people truly critically think about information it makes them uncomfortable as they work through that question it may transform their thinking and it it makes them truly think about the way that they think or why they're thinking it and it gets deeper so a good question can change everything in a classroom in education we tend to value a student's ability to answer our questions so that a lot of times you'll see the teacher has a question one student answers teacher has another question another student answers but what might be more important than that strategy of one question one answer which doesn't engage the whole class and doesn't assess that the whole class actually knows the answer to that question you're just assessing that one student can answer your question right so what's more important than their ability to ask their own great questions and more critically their willingness to do so so instead of and i want you to consider instead of the teacher asking all the questions how can we get the students to start asking the questions how can we encourage that kind of inquiry in our classroom and we're going to talk about two strategies that really encourages dialogue and encourages shared inquiry so strategies that promote shared inquiry and dialogue so i'm going to start off with a socratic seminar and circle this can also be considered a socratic discussion so you might hear it called a socratic seminar a socratic circle or socratic discussion there might be slight variations in each one of these terms when people talk about it so whenever i talk about this one i'm going to kind of refer more to the socratic circle so socratic discussion which is also referred to as socratic seminar or circle is a group learning strategy designed to support students in open-minded examination and extended critical thinking through a dialogue in short students learn together by talking together in an open and student-centered format so we're taking the teacher out of it completely these discussions are not teacher-led but student-led students talk to one another so let me explain what it is because that's just the broad definition of a socratic similar so basically what you do is you can divide your class into two groups and you're gonna make a group into an inner circle and then you have the other students in the outer circle and what the inner circle is going to do is they are going to have a dialogue with one another about the content that you're teaching so maybe you have some questions that they answered beforehand and this inner circle talks about some of them and shares out their ideas and everyone in this inner circle participates and instead of the teacher asking that one question and getting that one answer the students are having kind of an informal conversation amongst themselves about how they answered it what problems they came up with some issues they had when answering the questions etc inside the circle you have a student that is the group leader so they kind of manage the inner circle dialogue so when they see that somebody hasn't said anything they may go hey joe i s i didn't hear you say anything did you have anything to add or they may see that there's a lull in the conversation and move the conversation forward to another question or discussion point that you know you have for the group then what the outside circle is doing during this time is they are adding notes maybe to their questions they're forming questions they're listening they're being active listeners in the classroom they will not participate in this inner discussion at all they are just being active listeners at the end of the time for the inner group let's say you set a clock for five minutes at the end of five minutes you're going to switch the groups the outer circle goes to the inner circle the inner circle goes to the outer circle and then they're going to flip roles so the new inner circle is going to either talk about the questions that the first inner group covered or a second group of questions or discussion points and again they're going to have an open discussion you're going to have a student that's the leader of this discussion this dialogue and then the outside circle is going to actively listen so this is kind of what it looks like truly in a classroom what a socratic seminar looks like what you can add to socratic seminar as a hot seat so basically by adding a hot seat you can add a seat for people from the outer circle that we talked about they can step in and ask questions to the inner group maybe make a comment or contribute a thought or whatnot to this inside group so if somebody from the outside group felt so compelled that there was a qui a burning question or a burning thought that they had about the discussion that was happening they could get up they could sit in the hot spot and enter the discussion but it wouldn't be for long and they wouldn't be able to do it over and over again because then that's whenever you have that student that's a strong student they'll take over the discussion coming in constantly in this inner circle discussion so this hot seat needs to be reserved for once a class period for each student so encourage students to enter into that hot seat however that they can only do it one time or just limit it don't let that strong student take over another strategy that promotes shared inquiry and dialogue is the use of question stems so this is a strategy where you teach students basic question stems that help them articulate any concerns and ideas that they have so about the content what questions burning questions do they have but maybe they don't know how to put the information necessarily into a question so we use an education bloom's taxonomy and the depth of knowledge chart so both of these are charts with measurable verbs and we use those measurable verbs to see if students are able to meet an outcome which is basically you do a lesson so that at the end the student can demonstrate in this case a measurable verb from the depth of knowledge chart or bloom's taxonomy i'm going to jump ahead real quick i just want to kind of show y'all in case you don't know what this is so again this is the depth of knowledge chart it has different levels of thinking so you have level one this is your most basic level of thinking level two you're building on that level three you get into higher order thinking with these verbs and lastly you have level four which is your highest level of thinking this is actually really critically thinking so you have your lower order abilities and you have your higher order critical thinking abilities and so when we are teaching a lesson the end goal is to have students demonstrate their knowledge and they can demonstrate their knowledge using these measurable verbs and you normally as a teacher use the measurable verbs in an outcome so you want the students to recite the pledge of allegiance very lower order it is just recalling something but by the end of the lesson you should be able to see that they are able to demonstrate their ability to recite because you can grade that you can grade a student's ability to recite something um and then it gets harder so going back to this question stem so both the depth of knowledge chart and bloom's taxonomy which is just a different version it has more layers than the depth of knowledge chart but it's the same um measurable verbs that they use both of these tools have question stems attached and so when i say a question stem you may be like i'm not quite sure what that is and it's basically just um the start of a question that no matter what you're teaching students can insert the content that you're teaching and form a question excuse me so examples of question stems might be which differences between blank and blank stand out to you why does blank never seem to blank how does blank impact blank how does blank work what's most important about and then insert the content what's most simple or complex about blank how would you classify and then when blank happens why does blank so these are just examples of question stems and if you teach your class if you start out your class giving them these question stems and you encourage them and give them time stop time and time to form a question from their question stems you are promoting that inquiry in your classroom and then once they ask the question either to the whole group or maybe you ask them to turn and ask their shoulder partner or just a partner that they have or their table partners if you ask them to turn and talk to their table partners about their questions you are then promoting dialogue in your class so i talked to you about the depth of knowledge chart the stems that come with the depth of knowledge chart align to each level of critical thinking so you may have some lower order lower students who aren't ready for higher level thinking about your content just yet and so their questions may fall within your level one or level 2 of your depth of knowledge chart whereas your higher performing students may come up with really good questions that fall in the critical thinking section of the depth of knowledge chart to give you an idea a dok 1 so that's the lowest recall type of questions would be here so again and this is an this is exactly an example of a of the depth of knowledge chart stem questions so all of these questions actually align to the verbs and the abilities found here so can you recall blank when did blank happen who was blank moving up a little bit you'll see that the questions get a little bit harder and it shows again that thinking so the student's ability to critically examine something so we're going from recall to a little bit harder in your dok wheel and again it aligns here so that skills and concepts so how can you i'm sorry can you explain how blank affected blank maybe how would you compare blank or contrast blank how would you classify blank so again they would take what they know about the content and form a question about it now there is i just want to let y'all know there is um a dok level three and four on this chart but i just wanted to show you what a question stem was and then how to use it in your classroom so maybe you cut up some of these question stems and put it in a bucket and you stop the class every once in a while and they pull one of these question stems and form a question with whatever they pull out of maybe you have these question stems on a piece of paper and you stop them periodically and you have them write a question from dok level 1 and dok level 2 and then later on in the in the class after they've learned a lot more maybe you have them form a question from dok level three and the okay level four so again there are off you know the dok stem questions are on all four but i'm just giving you an example of of what two of them look like so i'd like to reinforce with you that teaching our students when we teach our students to ask questions and how to ask the right questions or good questions are empowering them with the ability to get the information they need and to be successful so i can't tell you how powerful it is when we can empower our students to ask questions and to know how to ask the questions that are really burning in their minds that they don't know how to articulate so again it's extremely powerful and a powerful strategy within your classroom so these are the references for this video and as always please reach out to your professor if you have any questions about this material i'd also like you to access the materials within this module it should build off of this foundational knowledge found within this lecture video you all have a great day and i'm dr williams