Synthesizing Learning Engagements: Digital HOTS Part II

This blog post is a continuation of thought from the previous reflection entitled, “Are Digital HOTS Worth The Time They Take?”

In the week since first posting on this thread of thinking, I have reconfirmed that the theme that seems to be running through my life on all levels (professionally, pedagogically and personally) is that of balance. In regards to digital HOTS, I have been struggling to cope with the fact that, some days and some weeks, the schedule I’ve created to try to intentionally ensure that subject balance was adhered to (more so for my own self-discipline than to provide a predictable routine for my students) has been thrown out the window. In addition to the loss of balanced subject allocation within the time provisions, I have also lost a certain degree of confidence and assuredness in how I am teaching. I feel this self-questioning is not only a natural component of the profession, but an integral part of the reflective and learning process.

Photo Credit: stuant63 via Compfight cc

This past weekend, I went scuba diving for the second time and earned my Advanced Open Water certificate. There were dives where everything went well and I felt very comfortable with my skill development. There were also two dives in particular where I felt completely disoriented, uncoordinated, out of control and, simply…out of balance. Upon returning to the dive boat, I was reflecting on the process of the various dives and realized that I valued those dives where I made the most mistakes more than those where I was in my comfort zone. I was grateful for messing up and experiencing that feeling of what not to do, because I was able to improve upon those skills the next time around due to greater metacognitive awareness.

Slowly, with diving and with pedagogy, those reflections of what to do rather than what not to do become more intuitive and engrained. I will never stop questioning and wondering if what I’m doing is best for my students, but I will learn something each time I ask it. For me, each time I ask about how to find balance across subject disciplines, I learn a little bit more about my own habituated ways of teaching and thinking that I hope to de- and reconstruct in order to find the middle ground.

In my case, I have been worrying that I’m spending too much time on digital HOTS and not enough time on direct literacy instruction. One of the reflections that has come out of this process is that I feel I need to see things from a higher perspective regarding subject discipline time allocation. Instead of looking at how many hours we spend on xyz from a weekly point of view, perhaps I can look at it from a monthly or yearly perspective? Additionally, although the projects are very transdisciplinary in nature, I think I could work on being more accepting of the fact that the application of comprehension strategies (making inferences, determining importance, asking questions) and writing skills (conventions, voice, sentence fluency, word choice) may not be as effective and efficient as those taught in more structured isolated learning activities. However, the manner in which students are brining all of their conceptual understandings, skill applications and communication techniques into a synthesized whole might be more authentic and relevant to them in the long run. Finally, another area I can work on improving is that, perhaps I’m getting too caught up in building a knowledge base for my students to launch their conceptual understanding off of. In order to free up a little more time earlier in the unit, I might relinquish my self-fulfilled need to provide more content knowledge than an 8-9 year old would readily require, or even recall a few months from now.

I still don’t have the answer as to what degree my students are benefiting from long-term inquiry projects that require time-consuming digital HOTS or whether they are missing out on more foundational aspects of literacy instruction due to them. As with everything in education, it’s a process…and a time-consuming one at that.

In order to give the reader more specific examples of synthesized, transdisciplinary learning engagements happening in my class, here are three examples we have undertaken that have required Digital HOTS over the last two months.

Comparing and Contrasting Citizen Opportunities Through an iMovie:

 Instead of having students make Venn diagrams and discuss the differences between opportunities citizens of different countries have access to, I wanted students to dabble in the HOTS of movie production. First, students selected three countries they were interested in inquiring about. Next, they had to choose four concepts they wanted to learn more about and compare and contrast those concepts across their countries. The concepts were: geography/land, economy/jobs, culture/people, education, food, entertainment and settlements/shelter.

I shared a Google Doc with my students, who then had to make their own copy to keep in their folders in My Drive. Over the subsequent two to three days, students inquired into their chosen concepts through their selected content and completed the graphic organizing table found in the Google Doc. In this part of the process, students were using their reading strategies to determining importance and find out what text was of value to be noted down. They were also making inferences not by writing down random facts that couldn’t answer the question, “So what?” But instead, they were inferring meaning by making connections to their previous knowledge base to create mini stories based on isolated facts found in the text. To hone their writing skills, students were learning to take notes using short phrases and to work on paraphrasing and summarizing.

After students completed their graphic organizer, they went onto Google Images and Compfight to begin selecting powerful images that represented the ideas they determined were important within each concept. Students were encouraged to look for images that were “sticky,” or ones that stuck in people’s minds due to its captivation and the story it might tell in the background. This part of the process is where students were evaluating photos based on their effectiveness in communicating the concept they would like to teach their audience. After students had selected 36 photos (twelve photos across four concepts for each country), they embarked upon making an iMovie project.

 They completed an iMovie storyboard that organized how they were going go communicate their data in an effective way. The ordered their title and concept introductory slides along with the sticky country photos that compared and contrasted their areas of study. In iMovie, students evaluated themes, selected transitions and added simple subtitles to each of their photos. They also utilized the zoom in and zoom out option on each photo in iMovie to non-verbally communicate what they wanted the audience to feel and experience while viewing their images.

After, students went into Garage Band and created a two bar track that would musically reflect the feeling they wanted their movie to convey. Students laid down this audio track in the background of their iMovie on repeat.

Finally, students learned about higher level compare and contrast connectors (vocabulary from our EAL teacher) and narrated an audio track to go along with the concepts they were comparing across their three countries. The learning objective of narrating the iMovie was to specifically make the students practice using those higher level compare and contrast vocabulary connectors in their oral language. They referred back to their graphic organizer in Google Drive to access the inferred knowledge base they were comparing and contrasting verbally as the movie’s narrator.

Credit: Brighde Reed, NIST International School

Upon completion, students then published their iMovies onto their personal blogs, emailed links to their families and commented on each other’s projects.

https://tinyurl.com/lbracud  (Tem’s iMovie)

 Data Handling and Google Forms:

At some point in elementary school, we need to get away from collecting data with tally marks. From the time students are six until they are at least ten, tally marks always seem to be the default activity for surveys.

Students from other classes typically ask permission to interview students in your class, then proceed to give oral surveys without giving indications of how many times students can raise their hand. Impulsive students raise their hand early in the survey and then the data collecting students give them more options to choose from after a student has raised his or her hand on the first option. It tends to be a well intentioned collection of data on the student’s behalf, but a complete disaster in efficacy and efficiency.

Although students are collecting data, the results are heavily skewed and there isn’t much student reflection in the process of how to administer a survey. The focus seems only to be on counting tally marks and drawing bar graphs on graphing paper in the end. This year, I tried something different.

Students were first emailed a Google Form that I had created to introduce them to a digital survey before they knew they were going to be creating one themselves. Later that week, I taught them how to use Google Forms and write multiple choice survey questions. This would ensure that they provided the respondent with answers to select from right away, rather than after the fact (as some verbal surveys do).

Students then wrote five survey questions in their math notebook that had to be centered around our central idea, lines of inquiry or related concepts. Students edited and revised their survey questions to ensure specificity was adhered to and vague generalizations or misinterpretations were avoided.

Next, students created their own Google Form, selected the theme they felt best aligned with the types of data they were collecting and began to create their online survey. Once completed, instead of interrupting other classes to ask students to, “Raise their hand if…” students requested their email addresses and asked them if they would be willing to complete an online survey in the next two days. The data collectors came back to our class, entered the email addresses of their classmates, those of students from other classes in our year level who willingly participated and the email addresses of their family members they had access to. Students wrote a message to be included in the body of the survey invitation email to introduce who they were, what their objective was and to request for assistance in their data collection.

After completing each others’ surveys and allowing participating schoolmates and family members time to do so as well, students opened up a Google Sheet where there responses were recorded and logged in an accurate way. They counted up the responses for each of their multiple choice options and noted them down near their first draft questions in their notebook.

To communicate their findings, students used Haiku Deck to present not only their survey results, but a story of the process they went through to obtain the data. Embedded within the digital app was a procedural text and a reflective component, which gave students an opportunity to reinforce those text types. Using Haiku Deck to create bar graphs and pie charts from scratch allowed students to engage more personally with data handling. The graphing option gave students a chance to reflect on the minimum and maximum values of the y-axis in bar graphs and evaluate which number of intervals would best communicate quantities on their graph. It also encouraged them to draw relationships between how raw numbers can be expressed using percentiles in pie charts and reflect how to effectively communicate through digital storytelling.

Students then posted a link to their Haiku Deck presentations on their personal blogs and commented on each other’s presentations and data findings. For those teaching inside the PYP, nearly all of the transdisciplinary research sub-set skills were evidenced in this data handling process, along with several other thinking and communication skills.

https://www.haikudeck.com/p/88eqNbLvcR  (Jene’s Haiku Deck)

https://www.haikudeck.com/p/AEcJuQsLyg  (Tanya’s Haiku Deck)

Personal Narrative of a Migrant Looking for Opportunities:

Students were given a writing task where they were to write a diary from the perspective a child living in a country that did not have not many opportunities available to them. The child and his or her family had decided to migrate across borders to find better opportunities. The students’ objective was to narrate their character’s daily life in their former country, their migrating experience and their life in a new country.

SimpleMind+Students began the process by pre-writing a detailed brainstorm in , a text-based mind-mapping tool that many students enjoy due to its color coordination capabilities. Students brainstormed three color-coded nodes off the centralized theme to indicate the three phases in this character’s life: former country, migration and new country. 

After writing out their diaries on paper over a series of a few days, students revised and conferenced with each other in their notebooks for how to improve the 6+1 Writing Traits we have been focusing on.

Upon receiving feedback and making their own first round of revisions, students re-wrote their second draft in Google Drive. Later, students shared their Google Doc with one or two other peers, who were given access to comment, in order to conference further. Peer partnerships provided real-time feedback and guidance on several of the writing traits in focus as well as the clarity of their classmates’ texts. Using the commenting option in Google Docs is a powerful way for students’ feedback to be recorded and accessible at any point in the writing process. Students value having online chats discussing their thinking and seem to take their peer’s suggestions more to heart when they highlight something specific in their text.

Students then published the final draft narratives in Google Drive and shared their published copies with each other.

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These are just a few examples of some of the synthesizing transdisciplinary projects we have been doing lately in our class. Although they might be ambitious in the scope of concepts, skills and literacy/numeracy applications, students readily begin to see the interconnectedness of everything they learn. Despite the fact that these processes and digital products tend to take much longer than a more traditional approach, I feel they are of value and will allow students to hover in the higher order thinking skills with more regularity, not only the digital product, but also increasingly so, throughout the entire process. It is my goal over the next few months to continue to provide these types of learning experience for my students, but do so in a way that can scale back on some of the depth expected in the product.

To see how my students feel about learning through technology in a 1:1 iPad environment, student perceptions of digital HOTS projects and time allocation, please take a look at this blog post that synthesizes my own data collection on their learning through their eyes.