Learning and Teaching
at MFG
Term 4 Dates
Term 4 year is quickly coming to a close – here are some of the final key dates.
- ECP for students currently in Year 10 ends on Friday 4th December
- ECP for students currently in Years 7, 8 and 9 ends on Wednesday 9th December
- Activities Day for students currently in Years 7, 8 and 9 on Thursday 10th December
- School Based Activities program for students currently in Year 7, 8 and 9 runs from Friday 11th until Thursday 17th December
- Last day of School Based Activities Program is Thursday 17th December
- Staff Break-Up is Friday 18th December (no students at school)
Year 7 Ancient Egypt Exhibition
A wonderful feature of our Humanities program is providing our students with a range of opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding through an Exhibition that are often open to a wider audience than just the class.
Recently, our Year 7s shared their learning and insights from their Ancient Egypt Unit through the class Exhibition. A few teaching techniques and thinking routines used by teachers that sit behind the learning become evident in looking at our students’ work and listening to our students share their learning including:
Connecting to prior knowledge: 3-2-1 Bridge
Bridge:Explain how your new responses connect to your initial responses?
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This routine asks students to uncover their initial thoughts, ideas, questions and understandings about a topic and then to connect these to new thinking about the topic after they have received some instruction or teaching. This routine can be used when students are developing understanding of a concept over time. It may be a concept that they know a lot about in one context but instruction will focus their learning in a new direction, or it may be a concept about which students have only informal knowledge. Whenever new information is gained, bridges can be built between new ideas and prior understanding. The focus is on understanding and connecting one’s thinking, rather than pushing it toward a specific outcome. | ||
Inquiry questions: ‘Question Starts’ routine
This is a routine for creating thought-provoking questions. Students brainstorm a list of at least 12 questions about the topic or concept. They use these question starts to help frame interesting questions.
This routine provides students with the opportunity to practice developing good questions that provoke thinking and inquiry into a topic. It also helps students brainstorm lots of different kinds of questions about a topic. The purpose of asking deep and interesting questions is to get at the complexity and depth of a topic. The purpose of brainstorming varied questions about a topic is to get at the breadth, and multi-dimensionality of a topic.
We use Question Starts to expand and deepen students' thinking, to encourage students' curiosity and increase their motivation to inquire.
Note-making v Note-taking
We have had a school wide focus on note-making for a couple of years now. This is different from note-taking, which often simply involves a student passively copying the notes from the white-board or screen without much thought or processing.
One approach to note-making being trialled at the moment is the ‘Window Notes’ approach.
Window Notes is a tool that helps students create more meaningful, more dynamic, and more personal notes. It’s really as simple as making two lines on a sheet of paper to divide the note-making space into four separate quadrants that resemble a window. Each quadrant gives students a different way to interact with content and create their notes. Students use the quadrants to record important facts and details, ask questions that interest them, make connections to past learning and to their own lives, and express their personal feelings and reactions to what they’re learning.
Ask your child about their approach to note-making and see what they say.
Mr Damien Toussaint
Assistant Principal , Learning and Teaching
