Happy
August! Are you looking for a way to start the year off by building
community, research skills, and classroom culture? Do you want your
students to start by working together, and give you a chance to gauge their strengths
and weaknesses? Do you want something relatively hands-off for you, the
teacher?
Look
no further.
Inquiry-based
learning can sound daunting, but when put into practice, it’s a great way to
give your students independence and ownership of their learning. It lets
them practice both individual and group skills, perfect for the beginning of
the year. (If you want to learn more about IBL, here’s a good place to start.)
AND,
the packet for the unit is FREE in my new TPT store--check it out here!
IBL on IBL
Objective: students will work in groups to create a model of a
classroom conducive to collaborative learning, aka a “learning lab.” They
will receive a budget to “shop” for items online that they want in their
classroom and work with their groups to determine the best setup, items, and
furniture they want in their room.
Materials:
- Packet
(see TPT link--there are two articles we used that are hyperlinked in this
post, but for copyright purposes, I excluded them from the shareable
version of the packet)
- The packet includes pages for everything you’ll read
about: interview questions and notes, budget sheet, graph paper for
sketching, and reflection pages
- Cardboard
boxes--one for every two groups (you’ll cut these in half)
- Paint/brushes
- Craft
supplies for model building (see below for what we used)
- Hot
glue gun (optional)
I
wrote this unit for a fourth-grade classroom, but it could easily be tailored
to suit any 3-6 grade classroom. Another great thing about this unit? It
directly teaches the students about collaboration and lets them practice
collaborative skills.
My
fourth grade teacher friend, Emily, who I taught this with joked that this is
pretty meta--IBL on IBL.
We
structured this unit over the course of three full days, but I would recommend
dividing it over 5 days, since you probably have lots to cover at the beginning
of the year! I’ll be writing it following the timeline we used, but obviously
do whatever suits your class’s needs.
Day 1
Before
we started, Emily split her class into groups of 4-5, and students sat with
their groups. We started off by having the students read this article on
collaborative classrooms (the article is a bit complex for most elementary schoolers--I
condensed it for our fourth graders) and this one to give them an
idea of what collaboration looks like. The students read the articles and
had a whole-class discussion about them, and each student got to write
something on the board about what teamwork.
Then,
each group made a poster answering the question, “What does teamwork look
like?” As with any IBL lesson, students should have guidelines as to what
you want them answering, but give them freedom in how they present it. We
had some groups who did drawings, some did bullet points, some wrote full
sentences, and some did a bit of everything. The important thing is that
explain their message when they share with the group. After they shared,
we hung their posters up on the board for the duration of the unit.
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Group
poster--apologies for the photo quality, but you get the idea!
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After
ensuring everyone understood what collaboration is (this would be a great term
for a word wall), we moved onto flexible seating. Most students--unless
they have really cool teachers with really cool budgets--think of a classroom
as having desks and tables, so this is a really fun chance to broaden their
thinking. We put together a slideshow of pictures pulled from teaching
blogs, Pinterest, and other online resources to show them innovative classroom
setups, all of which were very different (one of my favorites was very
minimalistic but looked like a log cabin, which the boys especially loved).
Ask students to share what they see and, if necessary, point out
different things in different rooms: bean bags, tables on wheels, different
chairs and stools, standing-height tables, etc.
*Tip: some of the students would look at the
pictures and complain, “Our classroom doesn’t look like that!” Perfect chance
to remind them that the classroom they design can.
Interviews
The
next part of our unit is my favorite, but depending on your school, you’ll
likely have to tailor it. A key part of IBL is community, which is where
these interviews come in. We were lucky to have some great second grade
teachers who accommodated us and let us borrow their classrooms and students.
The
second grade classrooms at our school happened to actually have flexible
seating, so our groups wrote interview questions for the second graders about
their flexible seating. A lot of students haven’t been in charge of
asking other students questions before, so this is a great chance to model what
an interview looks like ahead of time. Each group was expected to have three
questions, and they also had a page in their packet to write answers. We
split our class in half so we didn’t have twenty fourth graders descending on
one classroom.
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Teacher-modeled
interview questions
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Something
we really wanted to do but were unable to was to have an administrator come in
and tell students about what budgets look like for teachers--where does the
money in a school come from, how do teachers have access to it, what are other
ways teachers can get funding for their classroom.
Day 2
Budget
Our
students had an imaginary budget of $1,500 to work with for their classroom.
We gave them a lot of freedom in looking for items, but you could
definitely put together a guide of items and prices if you didn’t want them
exploring too much online--but it was fun to see some of the things students
found! One group found some really cool tables that had adjustable
heights, and another found refurbished iPads for a really good price. This is a
great opportunity to teach students some internet search skills (maybe your
friendly librarian can come in and do a research lesson!).
After
the groups had agreed on what they wanted in their room, they used the graph
paper to draw out how they wanted to set their learning lab up. We didn’t
worry about having them make things to scale--at the beginning of the year, we
weren’t as concerned with that math skill as we were about teamwork and some
basic spatial reasoning.
Day 3
Building
This
is by far the most fun part of the unit. When students have their
blueprints done, they get to start building. This requires the most prep
work on the teachers’ part, but it’s so worth it.
We
got some medium-sized packing boxes from Walmart and cut them in half.
The boxes had enough “floor space” for students to add a lot, but also
shallow enough to be easy to work in. We bought duck tape to do the walls
and let students pick which color they wanted, but I would strongly recommend
you, the teacher, painting the walls ahead of time. We didn’t have enough
time for paint to dry, but taping those boxes took forever!
We
purchased a ton of craft supplies--cotton balls, pipe cleaners, foam sheets,
glitter, glue, popsicle sticks, yarn, etc.--and laid them out for the students.
We also had a glue gun (teacher use only) for harder-to-glue items.
We
gave our groups a few hours to create their masterpieces, and at the end of the
day, we displayed them and the class got to “tour” them. Finally, each
group shared their classroom. Here are two of my favorites:
 |
This
group decided to design a preschool classroom and made lower tables, lots of
beanbag chairs and short stools, a whiteboard, a big teacher chair, and a
board where pictures of the students' families could be displayed. We helped
them string "lights" across the ceiling . . . and they used a lot
of glitter.
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Reflect
A
crucial part of IBL is reflection--what they learned, what they still want to
learn, and so on. The packet includes a page on this, but if you prefer
to have students use a separate reflection journal, go for it!
Bonus Ideas
- If
you’re lucky to have a generous classroom budget, have your class pick
some items from their models to actually purchase for the classroom.
This drives home that real-world application and gives students a
real sense of ownership of their classroom.
- Alternatively,
set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for your class (if you have
experience using any money-raising site, please share in the comments!).
- If
you incorporate students’ ideas into your classroom, revisit monthly or
quarterly to have students reflect on what’s working and what they would
change or add in the classroom.
- Build
a word wall with terms from the unit, e.g. collaboration, flexible
seating, blueprint, model, learning lab
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