Taking Responsibility for the Environment

School: Ridgway

Year Level: Y6/7

Teacher: Rod Scott

Focus area: Student awareness of and ability to use key learning tools for their achievement level (e.g. organisational tools, process tools, thinking tools, learning habits, technology, presentation tools, etc)

Research Questions:

Question 1. Implementation: How students identify issues, concerns, and interests that could become the focus of learning.

Question 2. Engagement: How engaged are students when they are involved in identifying themes/topics for learning?

Question 3. Knowledge: What is the growth in knowledge that can be expected of students when they learn through a theme that they themselves have identified

Success Criteria for Knowledge

Expert: Is aware of the consequences of their choices and plans to make more choices that have positive effects on the environment
Practitioner: Can analyse the effects on the environment and make choices accordingly
Apprentice: Can describe the positive or negative effects that their choices have on the environment
Novice: Can recognise that choices have positive or negative effects on the environment

Question 4. Competency: What capability can be expected of students to identify themes/topics for learning at the year 3 – 8 level

Success Criteria for Competency

Expert: Use graphic organisers to sort information and then use it to decide on a required next step (Finding out or action.)
Practitioner: Use a graphic organiser to sort information
Apprentice: Can describe how to sort information on a graphic organiser
Novice: Can retrieve information off a graphic organiser

Learning Story:

This aspect of our focus on personal responsibility followed on from our work outlined in the last blog. This time the focus shifted to the deep understanding of:

“Taking personal responsibility for the natural environment will have positive effects for the future of our world”

The unit was run across the middle and senior school.

We began our programme around this understanding with these provocations:

“Do I really care about the environment?”

“Can I make a difference?”

The big ideas we used to facilitate this were:

“Can people make choices that have positive effects on the environment?”

“Can people make choices that have negative effects on the environment?”

“What do people need to live?”

“What is the Natural Environment?”

Assessment was managed through use of the student engagement survey using the endpoint from the first set of surveys as the startpoint for the next.

Student knowledge and competency was assessed by the students self assessing using the standard rubric and a justifying comment. I also did some teacher confirmations across a sample group who verbally explained their self assessment. The rubrics were a result of a cooperative effort across the middle and senior school teachers.




We began the unit with a tuning in phase to try and engage the children. We used a variety of activities to achieve this such as:

If the world was an apple
Pressure on our world
First ideas brainstorm (What do you do that you show that you care about the earth)
Unpacking the big understanding and big ideas
Initial placement on rubric
The web of life
Rubbish Stock take around the school

We came to shared understandings around our big ideas through a variety of small group actions that brainstormed the questions, ordered the degree of effect, and reported back to the class the outcomes. This provided some hearty discussion and disagreement, but we eventually came to a landing on what we thought the big ideas meant.

After this we entered into our finding out phase which centred on two key aspects:

Science Fair
Take Action for Water

Ridgway School has over the past couple of years been encouraging the children to get involved in the Science Fair competition. This year we used it as a vehicle for the children to find out about the environment and the effects peoples actions had on it. The criteria was that any experiments the children undertook were related to the deep understanding and the big ideas.



As a consequence there were some excellent projects undertaken that explored many aspects of the deep understanding and big ideas. They provided a good discussion point and were on the whole very informative pieces of work. They also provided a great lead in to the “What do we do about it?” phase.



The final aspect to our finding out was the Take Action for Water unit run in conjunction with the Wellington Regional Council. It was interesting to note however that the idea of a field trip to study streams and factors affecting water quality met with considerable resistance from the children. The feedback from the children was that for a significant proportion of them, the whole “environment” thing had been over done and they were tired of it. This of course ran counter to our aim of increasing student engagement!

Whist the end engagement data wasn't where we'd hoped it didn't reflect this feeling in the class. The Take Action trip itself eventually proved to be a real motivator in driving the children to take action and possibly diluted the lethargy evident in the class.



At this point it was take action time.

As a result of this trip and the follow up activities the class decided on creating compost bins as an action we could take that would have a positive impact on our environment. To achieve this the children undertook some research into bin design and in cooperative groups went about using this knowledge to design a set of bins for the school.

Presentations were made by each group outlining how their bin met all the criteria a good compost bin should have and the whole class then decided on the winning design.

At the time of posting the bin was under construction.

Results:

Outcome 1. Engagement:

SCALE: 1 = never, 2 = not very often, 3 = about half the time, 4 = often, 5 = always

Mean level of engangement of students ...


Offered ideas- at start 3.2; at end 3.3
Asked questions - at start 2.9; at end 3.4
Listened to and thought about other's ideas and responded respectfully - at start 3.7; at end 3.8
Used positive body language related to task - at start 3.7; at end3.7
Perservered in order to enact related task - at start 4.1; at end 3.9
Showed evidence of being active learners outside school time - at start 2.0; at end 2.1
Showed interest in directing their own learning - at start 3.9; at end 3.7
Had behavioural issues that impacted on their learning - at start 1.8; at end 1.8
Show evidence of using what they have learnt - at start 3.9; at end 3.7

Outcome 2. Knowledge:

Number of students who were ...

8. Proficient experts - at start 0; at end 0
7. Beginning experts - at start 6; at end 6
6. Proficient practitioners - at start 1; at end 8
5. Beginning practitioners - at start 11; at end 9
4. Proficient apprentices - at start 8; at end 5
3. Beginning apprentices - at start 4; at end 2
2. Proficient novices - at start 0; at end 0
1. Beginning novices - at start 0; at end 0

Outcome 3. Competency:

Number of students who were ...

8. Proficient experts - at start 1; at end 2
7. Beginning experts - at start 8; at end 10
6. Proficient practitioners - at start 14; at end 16
5. Beginning practitioners - at start 8; at end 3
4. Proficient apprentices - at start 0; at end 0
3. Beginning apprentices - at start 0; at end 0
2. Proficient novices - at start 0; at end 0
1. Beginning novices - at start 0; at end 0

Conclusions:

As can be seen in the results there was an upward trend in the students self asssessment regarding their knowledge of the effects their choices had on the environment.

Competency in the use of Graphic organisers was already relatively high so the changes, whilst trending higher were not great.

The most interesting point was the student engagement. As stated engagement waned as the topic went on for a number of reasons.The most significant was the length of time we spent on the environment. Our idea to integrate it into the school curriculm activiies for the whole year proved to be counter productive in terms of student engagement. The intention was to focus on different aspect in different terms but this seemed to be too protracted to hold the children's interest and engagement.


Anecdotal evidence suggests that the "take action" phase did act to rekindled some interest. The children were animated and proactive in their efforts to "sell" their bin design and many were seen researching and designing through lunch and morning tea time. However when it came to the final engagement survey these observations were not borne out in their answers.


As a result our first 2009 Inquiry topic will be run over a shorter time frame and without the multiple phases we attempted this time.