Day 15: Primary Source Info, Preparing to Inquire, Presentation Ideas and Padlets

Primary Source Information:

We want as much primary source information as possible. We are not after a Chinese whispers, internet driven, copy and paste assignment. Discussions and encouragements have been around the pursuit of talking to people who experiencing the issues or are experts in the fields covered. 

Preparing to Inquire:

With newly established Lines of Inquiry, it is time to allocate/align questions to those lines as well as the key concepts being covered. Once this has been achieved, a brainstorm takes place to come up with primary sources that will help us find, locate and answer our questions. (Who can we speak to, where can we visit.)

Presentation Ideas:

• Video (documentaries, animations, zoom recordings, Ted Talk style, adverts, news reports, interviews, virtual tours, Plays, etc.)
• Audio (interviews, music)
• Diagrams (graphs, info graphs, technical drawings, labelled diagrams, cross-sections, before and after, etc.)
• Pictures (photos, artworks, provocations)
• Surveys
• Quizzes (Kahoot)
• Links
• PDF printouts
• Stories (picture books)
• Journals, Diaries
• What else can you think of?

Below is a Ted Talk example that we watched in class that also shows and ins-ire’s what is possible if you are passionate about an issue and your willing to make an effort to see change.

Padlets:

We looked at Padlets and Website design as a way of colllating and presenting our inquiries. Students all seemed pretty keen to use a Padlet as the chosen format for this role. it will be interesting to see what other formats they include within their Padlet to demonstrate their findings.

Catching Up With Mentors

Regular meetings with mentors is a big part of the exhibition process. Having an extra pair of eyes and ideas is great for bouncing ideas back and forward. 

Each group has met with their respective mentors and have begun developing a working relationship which should benefit their learning journey.

Day 12-14 Questions, questions, questions and Central Ideas and Lines of Inquiry

Using the Lotus Diagram, many questions have and are still being asked that link directly with the IB Key Concepts. 

We then reflect on these questions to see if they fit within the Sharing the Planet Theme and also look for any concepts that have a recurring theme (these are often the questions that lead to successful inquiry).

Following this, a conference is had with a teacher to help students turn questions into a Central Idea and Lines of Inquiry. Here is a draft version for the group above:

Then it’s time to organise the questioning with the Lines of Inquiry and let the inquiring begin.

Day 11: Goal Setting and Getting in Touch with Mentors

This session was a chance to look at our own growth and development by setting ourselves 2 goals. One goal was to be linked to the Learner Profile Attributes and the other to the IB Approaches to Learning. These goals were based on areas of improvement as highlighted by our previous self reflecting. 

We also looked at the way we communicate by looking into writing emails. The idea was to contact our mentors and introduce ourselves to them. This was a way to not only make a positive start to the mentor/mentee relationship but also a way to practice composing a formal email. This could come in handy when contacting people or organisations as part of our researching and search for primary information.

Day 10: Understanding Key Concepts and Asking Questions

IB Key Concepts help us guide our inquiries. Today we have looked into understanding the Key Concepts and where our initial questions fit in. To do this we went through an example of an issue, ‘graffiti’, and brainstormed some questions around it.

We then tried to match the questions to the Key Concepts. What we discovered was that some questions can align with more than one Key Concept and questions can be interpreted differently depending how they are written. As a group we certainly seemed to get the hang of it.

We also started to discuss the notion of having related concepts. From the above brainstorm, we noticed that a common thread in amongst some of the questions was ‘impacts’. ‘Impacts’ could be used as a related concept.

The next task was to sort out existing questions onto a Lotus Grid that organises the Key Concepts. 

Once we have organised our existing questions, it is time to brainstorm more and begin to use some critical thinking skills and deciding whether the questions posed fit with the theme of Sharing the Planet.

Day 9: Groups and Questions

Big Day...

Groups are sorted and ready to get going. Before jumping in to some work, it was important to brainstorm and discuss what is the most important aspect to consider when working in groups. The result was there is not one important thing but many key factors. Here is the discussion notes:

The key aspects of working in groups...

Listening to others

Including everyone

Pulling your weight

Cooperating

Respect opinions

Compromise

Openly communicate

Positive attitude towards your group

and importantly,

Respect people’s efforts

Now it was time to work in our groups to share and ask questions about the chosen issue. This year there are nine issues being inquired into and 10 groups working on these. Here is the results from our initial questioning...

🏅A gold star effort from the Senior Unit today. That’s a great start with questions!

Day 8: Self Learning Reflection and Goal Setting

A big part of IB and Exhibition is reflecting and understanding ourselves as learners. To help us with this, we are also set the challenge of setting two goals in areas we can improve or areas of focus (one Learner Profile Attribute goal, one Approaches to Learning goal).

We start this process by reflecting on the Learner Profile Attributes and ranking them in order of personal strength. (We didn’t include reflection in this task as we will be working on regular reflection throughout the exhibit.)

We then looked at the Approaches to Learning and highlighted a skill within each area that we could improve upon.

The next step is to use this self reflection information to set our two goals. We will also need to reflect on and note examples of the different Learner Profile attributes and Approaches to Learning skills As we continue our Exhibition journey.

Day 7: Choosing Preferences and Academic Honesty

We sat in two circles to share with others which issues from the list interested us and why. After sharing with one person the circles randomly rotated so that we shared with other people. It was great to hear the thoughts of others and especially why they were interested in certain issues. This gave us some different perspectives of the issues and helped us understand our own thoughts more.

Based on the cut down list of issues, students were asked to think about the issues and respond to the ones they were interested in by answering a couple questions. Here are a couple examples:

What is the issue?

Habitat loss

 

Do I have any connections to the issue? (Or why does this issue matter to me?) because I did an assignment when I was little about it and I love animals so I have always kept it in the back of my mind. 

 

What questions do I have about the issue?

• I want to know how much habitat loss is here in SA
• I want to know what animals are effected by habitat loss
• I want to know what individuals can do to help
• I want to know what habitats of animals are actually destroyed
• I want to find out if it is necessary to destroy habitats and a way around it

What is the issue

Homelessness

 

Do I have any connections to the issue? (Or why does this issue matter to me?)

When we are walking down near the local Big W and Woolworths we see lots of people sat next to the building asking for money. They look like they have come from bad backgrounds and don’t have a lot of money. I feel like we need to make a change and help people who are local with us.

 

What questions do I have about the issue?

What do the homeless shelters do to help homeless people? How do homeless people lose their home? Have they been taken away, destroyed or not had one to begin with? How can we support them? How can we make a change and help the homeless?

After clarifying our thinking, it was time to select our top three issues preferred issues in which to inquire into. From these preferences, Mrs Eckermann, Mr Boesch and Mr Semmler have the task of trying to sort us all into groups.

In amongst this process, we also looked at ‘Academic Honesty’. We discussed the need to do our own work and show respect to others by referencing them if we get information or images from them. As this is about being a principled learner, we also signed an agreement to make every attempt to be academically honest during the Exhibition process.

Day 5: BONUS ROUND The Blob Tree Reflection

The Blob Tree has been introduced as a reflection tool for students to use at regular intervals. It is used by highlighting people on or around the tree at regular intervals throughout the exhibition process. The question they need to consider when reflecting is...

How do I feel about exhibition right now?

Students colour and date the Blob that matches their reflection. Then they write a short sentence or two to explain why they chose that blob.

Day 5 & 6: Looking further into issues and prioritising

From searching through the current newspapers we were able to find these local (town, state or country) issues that can fit under the Sharing the Planet Transdisciplinary Theme. Here is an example that we found in the papers...

The next step was to brainstorm again issues that we find interesting or connected to. This was a time consuming task and took several lessons. These lessons include a discussion on primary and secondary source information. In Exhibition, we encourage greater use of primary sources.

Here a some of the issues students thought of that could looked at...

From this list of issues, we narrowed down the list by each student voting for three issues that they might be interested in inquiring into. This is the list we ended up with... (the issues that are highlighted are the ones that have been crossed out)

Our next challenge is for students to begin to think about what issues we would like to inquire into from that final list above. Then students can post their preferences to the teachers so that groups can be formed.

Day 4: Understanding the Transdisciplinary Theme

Today we undertook the challenge of trying to understand the transdisciplinary theme of Sharing the Planet.

As a group, this was a bigger challenge then we thought. This is what we came up with...

After this discussion we moved onto discussing some of the issues. We discussed that some of the issues highlighted during the watching of the documentary “2040” were in fact huge issues or a summary of multiple issues. The question was posed... could we break down broad issues into smaller issues. 

To answer this question we looked at the issue of pollution and broke it down in more issues. Here is our example: 

After breaking down an issue, we thought it might be good to challenge the students to identify local (Either local community, state or national) issues. To do this, students worried in groups to analyse recent newspapers. For this task we used the local Bunyip, The Advertiser and The Australian.

The aim was to find articles about issues that related to Sharing the Planet. Take a photo of the article/s and make a comment on the photo of how it is related to the Transdisciplinary Theme. This task is still in progress.

Day 3: Provocation Continues

We continued to view the documentary 2040 and had regular pauses to discuss the issues being looked into. Here is a list of issues we saw:

We also started thinking about the issues and looked to begin an art activity to present issues of interest using inspiration from the picture book, The Viewer, by Gary Crew and Shaun Tan. We look forward to seeing what artistic creations will be produced.

Day 2: Provocation

Yesterday we brainstormed what things might be included into an exhibit and how they might be used to engage. 

There are so many more ways in which to present, but this a good start. As the creative juices begin to flow, we hope students can come up with more.

Then we began our PROVOCATION:

The aim of watching this documentary is to look at issues in the world that we are facing as we move forward in the years ahead. While a lot of these are global, some can be drawn back to small local issues we can all look at from our home front.

Hit this link to watch the trailer:

https://youtu.be/p-rTQ443akE