Science PD

Susan discussed the importance of planned talk. It needs to be specific to be effective. 

Need the talk to drive the learning as you don't want the kids to just be doing an activity (which is what I think is happening in my class currently). 

Points for Reading as a Staff: 

Accountable talk - Question Cards- (Getting more Student to Student talk) 

Managing Talk through grouping- Mixed ability grouping is the most effective, can group students through interests of languages. (Some need for ability grouping) 

Managing Time- Show them a clock, how did we tell time in the past?

Cultural Diversity and managing Linguistics-  Adaptability of learners (Example; text messages being restrictive originally- students created a 'txt' language to fit more characters into their text messages) 

Setting Clear Expectations- Self-check/ 

Managing to speak, listening, writing, reading- Oral language is KEY to critical thinking. Explicitly showing them 'how' to talk. 

Knowing your learners- How important this is.


Science Task:

Susan taught us how to get our students to think critically and ask more questions during science sessions. We looked at discussion questions. We each choose two and then completed the learning task with that question in mind. This was helpful as it focused our thinking and we could think deeper about our question.

Next steps:
I'm going to print out question cards and use them in my next science lesson.