#ililc5 Ryan Hoy @Taisez Investigative learning

It was lovely to hear a fellow Norn Irishman at ILILC and Ryan delivered a very impressive session on investigative learning. He did his examples using History rather than focus on one language. 

For the first activity, we had to move along the room according to prior knowledge, whereby the top of the room was strongly agree, the centre (where we all landed) was I'm not sure and the bottom of the room was Disagree. We then moved on to the second  task which was in groups. We had to put 8 battles in chronological order. With the clue on the board of "getting to know your neighbours is always a good idea" we quickly realised that only 4 of the cards had the information we needed on them and that we had to talk to another group in order to complete the activity.  Having done this activity, we could respond better to the first timeline now.

John Connor @bootleian  got a shoutout here with his belief (and mine) that we need to move from being the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. ie we need to move away from giving the pupils everything. The temptation is to give them the answers but that doesn't move them on as effectively in their learning. Ryan also pointed that authentic collaboration is where pupils are working together on a task that genuinely needs more than one pupil to work it out, rather than a group of pupils doing a task that could easily be done by one pupil. 

So what do good investigations have? 

Intrigue 

Confusion 

Intense challenge 

Team work/collaboration 

A shared outcome 

Red herrings 

Clues 

TENETS 

• Confusion to a) heighten challenge b) induce engagement.                            Engagement not fun, two different things.                                                            Gave them all time activities at the start of the lesson and worked backwards 
• Extreme challenge (throwing students into the "Learning Pit") throw them in and let them climb out at the end - James Nottingham 
• Group-based investigation 
• Independence (silent beginning, cryptic instructions) eg our starter activity here 
• A roving, "prompting" teacher  - to help them along with 

Ryan ended the session by showing us a 14 minute video which had been recorded over an hour's lesson with him and a class of above average pupils. The key points were: 

• There were paper signs for start of lesson - Hola and Sentaos por favor, rather than him speaking. 
• First activity on board - unscrambling. The pupils started to talk to each other. Activity 1 was blue tacked under the desk - the groups had to organise words into sentences. The group discussions were very insightful. 
• Activity 2 A sentence on the board said "Comparatives always bracket a noun - ¿estás de acuerdo?" (Do you agree?) There were Spanish phrases stuck up round the room. There was an icon of Eyes on the screen as a clue along with a series of comparatives in English to translate.
• Activity 3 was a series of sentences which started with half Spanish and half English and worked towards full sentences in English to translate into Spanish. 
• Activity 4 was to rank the drugs from least addictive to most addictive. 
• Finally there was a Plenary on whiteboard 

This was an excellent lesson and an impressive session overall. The pupils were working at a high level with very little input from their teacher and even those who struggled were engaged with the tasks. I enjoyed this session and look forward incorporating ideas into my lessons.