Class 61 Begins Inquiry - World Cafe, Mapping and Models

World Cafe

Our grade 6 inquiry on community and mapping began with  World Cafe which is a communication method that I learned from Jennifer Chan of Exhibit Change who has extensive experience facilitating unconference events.

Students entered the room and selected seats at desks that were organized in groups of 4. I then gave them topics to discuss.

1. What pops into your head when you hear the word "mapping"?

Conversations were active, low-stress and allowed students to begin activating their prior knowledge or schema. After a few minutes, I stopped the conversations and asked students to get up and find a new table to sit at where they were given their next topic to discuss:

2. How does your family use maps?

Again, after a few minutes students moved and were asked:

3. What kind of things can you map?

and

4. What skills do you need to make a map?

At the end of the discussion I asked students why we had used this format. They got it:

1. "It allowed us to hear many different ideas."
2. "We got to work with lots of different people."



Problem-Solving

For those who have stood at the front of the class instructing students on how to use a duotang or write a title, date and subheading, and still ended up with 1/4 of the class doing this incorrectly, this is for you.

I handed duotangs and 1 sheet of paper per student to each table and said, "Discuss with the group how to insert a sheet into the duotang" This actually caused them to closely examine the folder, talk about how the holders open and close and discuss which way the paper should be inserted. Every student ended up with a centered title that was underlined and space between the title and sub-heading which was in line with the margin. No instruction needed. This is such a simple to get students to collaboratively begin solving problems.

Students then had a few minutes to note what had been discussed during world cafe.

Developing Conceptual Understanding of Mapping

My unit on mapping used to begin with the whole class learning to identify continents, oceans, major lines on a map, hemispheres, longitude and latitude. YAWN.

The goal  though is for students to develop conceptual understanding of what it means to transfer a 3-dimensional world to a 2-dimensional surface. So we began our inquiry with a problem. Our classroom is rectangular with a spectacular arched ceiling. I gave groups of 4 a large sheet of paper and asked them to map our classroom. This was hard and led to intense conversation, observations, false starts and design challenges and was probably one of the richest mapping tasks I have ever done with students. Students struggled, but persisted.  After 20 minutes students had the opportunity to visit other groups to see how they were approaching the task and take back ideas to their own groups.

Build a Model

Today groups were given paper, popsicle sticks, paper clips, plastercine, scissors and pipe cleaners and asked to build a model of the classroom. On Tuesday, when we return to class, groups will finish their models and then collapse them to 2 dimensions. We are, of course,  heading towards projections and understanding distortion.