I am so tired. My brain is just exhausted. The only inquiry I'm doing at this moment is about walking to the car and driving home--safely. Not really! I'm actually thinking a lot about everything we've been doing today and the personal challenge that some activities presented to me. I had to confront my reluctance to think about "place" and my feelings of the lack of place. I also had to confront feelings of deep insecurity about working on an idea for my demo. Although I knew I could do it and muscle through those feelings, it was tiring.
At this moment I'm considering having my inquiry project be about how to authentically use the writer's notebook/daybook in my non-traditional classroom to support inquiry, writing, synthesis and my new challenge: to support the Biology classroom.
I think that using the daybook in my own process during SI will enlighten me and give me ideas. I have already decided that I do not want to grade daybooks, but I want students to take ownership of them as a tool which will help them to perform better on other assignments. In this way the daybook is not THE assignment, but the TOOL to produce an assignment.
Tonight I plan to practice this idea by using my daybook to generate ideas for my self-selected piece of writing.
Until later...
Chritin,
ReplyDeleteYou've got some serious thinking going on here! No wonder you're tired! Can't wait to hear more about your daybook thinking! One thing you've got me wondering is how to get the students to see the value of the daybook in the way younare experiencing it?
Cindy,
ReplyDeleteI agree that getting students to see the value the way I do will be the challenge. They are teenagers after all, and sometimes don't respond well to adult enthusiasm. However, I do think they respond to authentic excitement, even if the initial response is the dreaded "blank stare." But what does this exchange and introduction to the concept look like? Gee...I'm not there yet!