Blog
Rigor: What do we really mean? And why inquiry sits at the heart of it
Recently, I facilitated a parent session at Jakarta Intercultural School focused on a word we use often… but don’t always stop to define:
Rigor.
As I listened to parents share their thinking, I was reminded how powerful and persistent our assumptions about learning can be.
Key Points for Teacher Reflection
Flexibility and Adaptability: the ability to adapt as needed, to not follow a rigid plan and realize that lessons often do not go the way you intended. Being a flexible teacher means that you are more likely to meet the needs of your students as you adjust the learning in response to student needs rather than ‘covering’ a checklist of predesigned activities.
‘I’m So Excited I Could Burst’
How do we cultivate curiosity, interest and wonderment? If we want students to genuinely inquire it is important that we give them the context for that to occur, a situation where curiosity, wonderment and excitement become a natural part of the learning process.
When working with a Grade One class that was exploring a unit on changing materials, to get the students thinking about the concepts driving the unit we decided to do the ice balloon activity from the Exploratorium site. http://www.exploratorium.edu/afterschool/activities/docs/iceballoons.pdf