Reflection of TLIF

Collaborative Knowledge Building - Room 8

Term 1, 2019

Over the course of the Term 1, Room 8 completed 2 Collaborative Knowledge Building (CBK) tasks. These were Rockets, and Guess Who Ninjas. Below, I will compare how I believe Room 8 completed each of the phases.

Part One: Open Exploration

Rockets - The children were set the task, and I did a shoddy demonstration. For this task I set the children's groups. I did this because I wanted to challenge the children to work with people they don't usually work with. I also wanted to avoid the low academic children being in a group; with set groups I was able to mix up abilities. 

Guess Who Ninjas - For this task we first ran through the rules. We played a dummy game first to ensure that the children knew how to play, and what the rules were. For this task the children were able to choose their own partners. 

With both CBK tasks, the children were very engaged. With the Rockets task the children were so engaged they didn't want to leave when the time was up. With the Ninja's task, the children finished at different paces and this sometimes was challenging. 

Part Two: Claims and Critiques

Rockets - This was our first task, and it took a few goes for the children to understand what a claim was and what was expected. Next time, if I was to do this again with this year group, I would cover what a claim was and what was expected in an unrelated lesson previously. Here, the children made claims as a group. This sometimes caused difficulty within the groups as children were upset or frustrated when they disagreed with their groups claim.

Guess Who Ninjas - The children were better at setting claims as they knew what was expected from the Rockets task. There were more claims this time as this time each child was asked to make a claim. This made grouping of ideas more visible, but not always easier. Each child making a claim worked well as I believe every child felt 'heard' to a certain extent. The difficulties with disagreements were a lot fewer this way. 

Part Three: Building Collaborative Knowledge

Rockets - With this task, the children were very stuck around the different fuels. They were unable to think of different claims aside from fuel based claims. They didn't trust each other's claims about what fuels worked and did not work, and others had blind persistence. For some who were initially successful, they repeated the same action every time, producing the same result with no variation.

Guess Who Ninjas - Here the children were better at asking questions and confirming or denying claims compared to that of the Rocket task. The children asked a different range of questions too, which opened the CBK more, in my opinion. 

Successes

• Engagement of children in tasks. 
• Collaboration between children, particularly in the rockets task.
• Claim statement worked well for Guess Who Ninja challenge.
• Having each child make a claim (Guess Who Ninja challenge).
• Time frame for challenges.

Next steps

• Time frame for conference (This was implemented in Rocket activity, but not GWN as I needed to support low level learners as they weren't spread out, and most had low learner buddies who were unable to help).
• Typed sentence beginnings to make conference time shorter.
• Implementing the line of trust sooner.
• Discuss blind persistence with children and the impact it has.
• Discuss the need to change at least one element each time. 
• Discuss the importance of questioning. 
• Where there is potential for time difference in completing activities, discuss clear expectations and potentially starting claim process instead of children waiting around.