Professional Inquiry Project: How to Foster Deeper Thinking within a Classroom

Introduction:

Through the first month of teaching at Alexandra Middle School, I had noticed that
under the new E.M.A.B scale of student assessment, students were not achieving marks that
they, or myself were satisfied with, and many of the students were confused about what each
level of the scale looked like. When meeting for the first time with our CTM/CRM groups, I
found out that I was not alone in my observation, and that typically high achieving students
under a percentage scale, were often receiving B’s or A’s on an EMAB scale.

During my meetings with the rest of the grade nine team, we decided our goal for our
first section of goal setting would be focused on creating deeper thinkers within our
classrooms. By creating deeper thinkers, our goal for the students was to create more insightful
answers, and to be able to take the base knowledge we were providing through the curriculum
and extend it to cross curricular outcomes and real life scenarios.

As a practicum teacher, this goal presented a great opportunity for myself to learn, and
work collaboratively with the other staff members which fit in with one of my TPGP goals. In
addition to the classroom, I also spent one day a week tutoring a grade 7 student from another
school, and this experience helped me in that I could try new methods to foster deeper learning
individually with this student before trying them at a classroom level.

Methods:

In order to complete our goal as a grade 9 team, we as teachers sat down and identified the
four following methods as those that we wanted to use within our classroom:

#1: Exemplars:

In order to start to create deeper thinkers within our classrooms, we as grade nine
teachers decided that we wanted to start by showing our classes exemplars of student’s work
for each level of the EMAB scale. For myself, about a month into school I had compiled different
levels of student responses on a recent math summative and also compiled results from all
three report card learning outcomes for math (computation, communication, and problem
solving).

When I gave the students back their summative, and took them through what the
expectations were, it was as if a light bulb had gone off in their head. No longer were students
confused about how they needed to work in order to boost their marks. Through my
discussions with the students, they told me that what they had gleaned from the exemplars
was that they needed to show their complete train of thought, needed to include their
vocabulary terms where appropriate, and should eliminate information that did not enhance
their answer. All of these student ideas I believed would allow students to enhance their
thinking and boost their mark.

After I had outlined the guidelines for students, the work they produced became far
more in depth than before. In math this took the form of students drawing diagrams to
enhance their math, using full sentences to explain their thinking, and using opposite
operations to check their calculations. In science this took the form of using vocabulary words
to enhance their answers, and providing informative well-structured sentences to answer
questions instead of minimal effort and information bullet points.

#2 Reflections:

As part of the students growth, we as a grade nine team also decided that using
reflections would benefit the students. Our goal as teachers was to have the students begin to
evaluate where their skills and knowledge were consistently strong, and places for growth.

Throughout the beginning of these reflections, students were hesitant to do them

properly, and often were disinterested because they were reflecting on assignments that had
already been marked, and topics that we had been moved on from. However once I reminded
students that these reflections were important for their P.A.T studying, most of the students
began to buy in.

I also found that through these reflections, students were better able to comprehend
their grading scores. Instead of students arguing that they deserved an M instead of an A, I
instead began to see students look to their reflections to identify that they had areas of
struggle, and that in order to meet an M in that area, they needed to improve on certain skills.

#3 Questioning:

The third way that as a teacher I tried to foster deeper learning within my class was that
I worked to reform how I was asking questions. First this started by working with the other
STEM teachers to form assignments that asked questions that forced students to think deeply.

This started by first using P.A.T questions on our assignments in order to challenge the
students with higher ordered questions.

Secondly I as a teacher tried to increase the depth of my questions to my students, and

tried to have students ask guiding questions before we started a new topic. For example
instead of asking a basic question such as “Are noble gases reactive or inert?” I instead aimed to
ask questions that eliminated simple yes or no answers and opted for more reasoning based
questions such as “If a block of zinc was surrounded by any of the noble gases, do you think a
reaction would take place?” I have found that by asking these more complex questions that I
am able to better gauge students understanding of topics as they are able to give more than
simplistic answers, and show their depth of knowledge.

Finally throughout the semester I have been working on the students ability to ask
questions. As one of my non-negotiables I have told my students I will not answer questions
until they are phrased in a way that makes it clear where their lack of understanding is. For
example instead of a students saying “I don't get scale factor at all, can you teach me?” my
students have instead learned to ask more focused questions like “I don't understand the
formula for scale factor, can you review it with me?” or “How can I use scale factor to solve for
the size of a reduced picture?” I have found that by forcing the students to narrow down their
questions from such broad statements, that they often answer their own questions, and are
much easier to help when they still require it.

4. Analyzation Methods:
As a team, we identified that students often were not identifying key components to questions,
and struggled to get started working on solutions to problems. In order to try to help the
students, we as a group introduced a few reading/analyzation strategies for students to try:

1. CUBES reading: As a Math team, we decided that having students use the CUBES
reading strategy to answer problems was a way to eliminate confusion over questions:
2. 3 Piece Reading: Often in science questions on the P.A.T require lengthy amounts of
reading. Often times students are so focused on the questions after the reading that
they skip the important information. The 3 piece reading strategy goes as follows:
i. Read the whole text through without looking at the questions that follow.
ii. Highlight/Underline any key information without looking at the questions
that follow.
iii. Read the questions and search the now highlighted areas. If you have
done a good job of identifying your key information, the answers should
pop right out at you.
3. Estimating: As a math team we again began to notice that many of the students
mistakes came from simple calculation errors that could be eliminated with basic
estimation. For example, often we would see the question 4.8 x 1.5 answered as 72 due
to forgetting to move the decimal place over to give the correct answer of 7.2. With
estimation, we showed the students that 4.8 is close to 5, and 5 x 1.5 is equal to 7.5, so
our answer would be near 7.5. Students that made these mistakes at the beginning of
the year often groaned that they were so close, and it gave them a sense of confidence
they could do the work, but that they just needed to check to make sure their answer
was plausible.

Results:

Throughout the year we as a grade 9 group have found the following results to be true
throughout each subject area:

1. Students ability to answer questions in non-simplistic ways were visibly better after
using exemplars. Student buy-in was much improved, and the work students produced
 on similar assignments shifted almost a letter grade per student. This showed me that
the understanding of students was there all along, but without us as teachers pushing
them to provide their best work, the students would not.
2. The students that bought into using our analyzation/reading strategies performed
better than those that did not. In my discussions with individual students and their
reflections, students told me that these strategies also provided them a calming effect,
and a starting point for every question.
3. Students that were meaningful in their reflections, and aimed to improve their skills did
so. By narrowing down from just “getting better at math” to things like “multiplying and
dividing rational numbers” students were able to focus on specific goals to improve
their learning, and this made my teaching that much easier.
4. Regulating a classroom became easier once students learned how to ask better
questions. Instead of trying to fly around the room to answer multiple shallow level
questions, students were able to often solve their own problems, or asked more specific
questions that took less time for me to answer.

With the goal of deeper thinking being worked upon for only one reporting term, and only the
completion of one reporting term in my time at the school, statistical analysis from term to
term has not been possible, but for future investigation into the subject, it would be interesting
to study the exact numbers of how much student achievement improves after going through
the term in which deeper thinking was our goal. However from discussions with the other staff,
there is a general consensus that student work and depth of thinking is improving slowly, and
that if the teachers continue to promote deeper thinking in the classroom, all students will
benefit.