Thursday, August 20, 2015

Deep thinking leads to deeper learning

Over the summer I attended the AVID summer institute.  It was by far the best professional development training I have ever attended.  One of the main focuses of AVID is using Cornell notes.  I am proud to say I used Cornell notes on day 1!!!  My direction instruction was a mini-lesson on voice and point of view.  The students completed the notes section in class and the questions section at home.  I gave the students a list of possible level one, level two, and level three questions, based on Costa's levels of questioning.  I purposely gave them very little instruction on how to write these leveled questions.  I wanted to know what they could do on their own.  Today, I had the students copy their questions onto sticky notes and place them according to the level of the question.  Next, I read the questions out to the class and we analyzed the questions for two aspects:  1.  Was the question placed within the correct level? 2.  Did the question make sense and correlate to the notes?

This activity allowed me an opportunity to see where my students were successful and where they might need some help.  The general consensus is we have level one down, but we still need to work more with writing level three questions.  This activity also gave the students a chance to hear examples from each level.



No comments:

Post a Comment