Learning Challenge Lessons, Elementary

20 Lessons to Guide Young Learners Through the Learning Pit

Jill Nottingham, James A. Nottingham, Mark Bollom, Joanne Nugent, Lorna Pringle

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781544330457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Métodos de enseñanza de la educación

"James Nottingham's work on Challenging Learning is a critical element of creating Visible Learners. This new series will help teachers hone the necessary pedagogical skills of dialogue, feedback, questioning, and mindset. There's no better resource to encourage all learners to know and maximize their impact!"

John Hattie, Professor & Director, Melbourne Education Research Institute
University of Melbourne Looking for more examples and more lesson plans to get started with Learning Challenges? Help is here!

Created to accompany The Learning Challenge, the twenty lessons collected in this book grapple with timely concepts and provide teachers with everything needed to run thoughtful, dialogue-driven challenges for elementary school students. Each lesson engages students around an exciting topic of current importance—including social media, voting, health, friendship, space exploration, language, fairness, and other issues—and invites students into the "Learning Pit" to explore their thoughts with others through dialogue.

The developmentally-appropriate lessons plans are designed to help young learners

• Learn new vocabulary in the context of dialogue
• Challenge themselves to think through complex concepts
• Follow their natural curiosity and seek answers to questions they pose themselves
• Think critically about issues and discover alternative viewpoints
• Explore disagreements reasonably and co-create meaning with others

Detailed lesson plans make it easy for teachers to facilitaterigorous and thought-provokingdialogue for students.Teacher resources include

• Activities to help students progress from surface level thinking to deeper understanding
• Techniques to get students "into the pit, " where contradictions and uncertainties force deeper thinking—and then out of the pit again
• Full-color activity cards to accompany each lesson
• Diagrams to help illustrate relationships between concepts for students

Each compelling topic challenges young students to think, to be reasonable, to make moral decisions, and to understand another person's point of view—all critical skills in today's complex world. Jumpstart meaningful learning for students with these rigorous and engaging Learning Challenge lessons.

Part I: Setting the Scene

Chapter 1 Preparing to Use the Lesson Ideas

Jill Nottingham and James Nottingham

1.0 Introduction

This book shares a range of excellent lesson ideas to help you guide your students through the “learning pit.” Here you will find guidance for setting up and running lessons around topics as thought provoking as exploration, language, fairness, time, and friendship. Each lesson has a set of resources to use with your students as well as recommended activities to make progress from first thoughts to deep understanding. The resources for each activity can be found on our companion website: http://resources.corwin.com/learningchallengelessons.

To make the most of each lesson idea in this book, we recommend that you also read the following books:

The Learning Challenge

The Learning Challenge (Nottingham, 2017) describes the theory and practice of guiding students through the learning pit. It covers everything from background to rationale, from establishing a learning culture to techniques for challenging, motivating, and guiding students from surface level knowledge to deeper understanding. It shows how contradictions and uncertainties can be used to think more deeply and how being “in the pit” makes learning more rigorous and engaging.

Challenging Learning Through Dialogue

Challenging Learning Through Dialogue (Nottingham, Nottingham, & Renton, 2017) shares some of the best strategies for using dialogue to enhance learning. It includes examples of the strategies used in the lessons within this book and Philosophy for Children (P4C) techniques to help students learn how to think, how to be reasonable, how to make moral decisions, and how to understand another person’s point of view.

These two books will give you a deeper insight into how to use the lesson ideas in this book more effectively. The main sections to read before trying out any of the lesson ideas in this book include the following:

The Learning Challenge

1. An introduction to the Learning Challenge: Chapter 1
2. Values and ground rules for engaging students: Sections 3.1, 3.2, and 3.4
3. Identifying concepts: Sections 4.2, 4.2.1, and 4.3
4. Creating and selecting questions: Sections 4.4 and 4.5
5. Generating cognitive conflict: Chapter 5
6. Constructing answers and the eureka moment: Sections 6.1, 6.4, and 6.5
7. Reviewing and metacognition techniques: Sections 7.1 and 7.2

Challenging Learning Through Dialogue

1. The difference between dialogue and discussion: Sections 2.0 and 2.6
2. Creating the right environment for dialogue: Sections 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3
3. Using dialogue to develop reasoning and reasonableness: Chapter 4
4. Groupings and ground rules: Chapter 5
5. Opinion Lines and Opinion Corners: Sections 7.2 and 7.3
6. How to run a Mystery: Sections 8.1, 8.2, 8.4, and 8.6
7. Philosophy for Children (P4C): Sections 11.1, 11.2, and 11.4

Once you have read these sections, you will be in a much better position to make the most of the lesson ideas in this book. For now, though, here are some brief notes to get you started.

1.1 The Learning Challenge

James Nottingham created the Learning Challenge in 2003 as a way to help his students think and talk about learning. It is rather like a child-friendly representation of Lev Vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development, which describes the move from actual to potential understanding. Since its inception, the Learning Challenge has captured the imagination of educators, students, and their parents. It has been featured in many periodicals, articles, and books, and it now appears on classroom walls around the world.

The Learning Challenge promotes challenge, dialogue, and a growth mindset. It offers participants the opportunity to think and talk about their own learning. It encourages a depth of inquiry that moves learners from surface level knowledge to deep understanding. It encourages an exploration of causation and impact; an interpretation and comparison of meaning; a classification and sequencing of detail; and a recognition and analysis of pattern. It builds learners’ resilience, determination, and curiosity. And it nurtures a love of learning.

At the heart of the Learning Challenge is the pit. A person could be said to be in the pit when they are in a state of cognitive conflict—that is to say when a person has two or more ideas that make sense to them but when compared side by side they appear to be in conflict with each other. Each of the lesson plans in this book is designed to create that exact situation so that your students need to think more deeply about the topic.

Here are some examples of the sort of cognitive conflicts you will find in this book:

• We are all responsible for our own actions, but sometimes we act because we are following orders or instructions from others (Lesson 3: Who Was Responsible for Sam Ending Up in the Hospital?).
• You can’t stop the clock or change time, but you can make time for things (Lesson 7: Got the Time?).
• If we throw something away it is garbage, but if someone else reuses it then it is not garbage (Lesson 9: What Is Garbage?).
• Social media builds my self-esteem because I feel good when people like my posts, but social media can damage your self-esteem because it can make you feel bad when people do not like your posts or make negative comments about them (Lesson 11: Should Theon Post That?).
• Fairness is about following the rules, but sometimes the rules aren’t fair (Lesson 12: Was Willy Wonka Fair?).

When your students think through these or other examples of cognitive conflict then they will find themselves in the pit.

It is important to note that learners are not in the pit when they have no idea. The pit represents moving beyond a single, basic idea into the situation of having multiple ideas that are as yet unsorted. This happens when a learner purposefully explores inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions in their own or others’ thinking so as to discover a richer, more complex understanding. That is why each of the lesson ideas aims to get participants out of their comfort zone. This is a deliberate and strategic objective. It is neither incidental nor casual. It is not something that happens parenthetically. The very purpose of the lessons is to get your students into the pit (and back out again)!

To achieve this, we recommend that you use the four steps of the Learning Challenge. You don’t have to include all of these steps in just one lesson and, indeed, you may not be able to because of time. We have included recommendations for each stage, but we have not said how you might time each step. For example, you might wish to set the scene and cover Stage 1 before the lesson, and you might like to invite your students to complete Stage 4 at a later date—perhaps for homework or within informal small-group extension activities. It really is up to you! Nothing is set in stone—which is why we have put them forward as lesson ideas rather than lesson plans.

The four steps of the Learning Challenge are as follows (see Figure 1.1):

Figure 1.1: The Learning Challenge

Stage 1: Concept

The lesson activities begin by familiarizing your students with the underlying concepts. It is not necessary for all participants to understand all the concepts. So long as some of your students have some understanding of one or more of the concepts, and then the lesson activities should work well.

Stage 2: Conflict

The next stage is to create some cognitive conflict around one or more of the concepts. The recommended questions associated with each lesson plan should help you achieve this—as should the structured activities. Remember that the key to the Learning Challenge is to get your students into the pit by creating cognitive conflict in their minds. This deliberate creation of a dilemma is what makes the Learning Challenge such a good model for challenge and inquiry as well as reasoning and reasonableness; it is also precisely what each of the lesson ideas is designed to achieve.

Stage 3: Construct

After exploring the concepts for a while (and we’re being purposefully ambiguous by saying “for a while” because it depends on context), your students will begin to make links and construct meaning. They will do this by examining options, connecting ideas together, and explaining cause and effect. Often (though not always) this leads them to a sense of “eureka” in which they find new clarity. Each lesson idea includes some recommended activities to help them reach this eureka moment by “climbing out of the pit.”

Stage 4: Consider

After achieving a sense of eureka, your students should reflect on their learning journey. They can do this by considering how they progressed from simplistic ideas (Stage 1), to the identification of more complex and conflicting ideas (Stage 2), to a deeper understanding of how all these ideas interrelate to each other (Stage 3). Now at Stage 4, they can think about the best ways to relate and apply their new understanding to different contexts.

1.2 Learning Intentions

The intended outcomes of the lesson ideas in this book are to help your students develop the following personal habits, abilities, and attitudes:

1. An inquiring outlook coupled with an ability to articulate problems
2. A tendency to be intellectually proactive and persistent
3. A capacity for imaginative and adventurous thinking
4. A habit of exploring alternative possibilities
5. An ability to critically examine issues
6. A capacity for sound, independent judgment

The lesson ideas also aim to help your students develop social habits and dispositions such as the following:

1. Actively listening to others and trying to understand their viewpoints
2. Giving reasons for what you say and expecting the same of others
3. Exploring disagreements reasonably
4. Being generally cooperative and constructive
5. Being socially communicative and inclusive
6. Taking other people’s feelings and concerns into account

Each of these can be achieved through the type of high-quality dialogue that the lesson ideas in this book are intended to generate.

1.3 High-Quality Dialogue

The lesson ideas in this book rely on the use of high-quality dialogue.

Dialogue is of high quality when it does as follows:

1. Challenges ideas, reasons, and assumptions
2. Makes participants wobble
3. Leads to deeper thinking
4. Encourages participants to co-construct meaning together

In the most basic sense, dialogue is the to and fro of talk between people...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• About the Contributors
• The Language of Learning
• Part I: Setting the Scene
• Chapter 1 Preparing to Use the Lesson Ideas
• Chapter 2 The Lesson Activities
• Part II: THE LESSON IDEAS
• Lesson 1 A Visit to Grandma’s
• Lesson 2 Why Explore?
• Lesson 3 Who Was Responsible for Sam Ending Up in the Hospital?
• Lesson 4 Should You Say Sorry?
• Lesson 5 Does Jake Need a Shared Language at School?
• Lesson 6 Good Thinking
• Lesson 7 Got the Time?
• Lesson 8 If Ricudo Lost His Home, Would This Be the Worst Thing That Is Happening in the Amazon Rainforest?
• Lesson 9 What Is Garbage?
• Lesson 10 Should Ms. Smith Raise Money to Plant Trees Within the School Grounds?
• Lesson 11 Should Theon Post That?
• Lesson 12 Was Willy Wonka Fair?
• Lesson 13 What Is Color?
• Lesson 14 What Is Cost?
• Lesson 15 What Is the Best Sport?
• Lesson 16 What Is Treasure?
• Lesson 17 Who Is the Greatest?
• Lesson 18 Is It Better to Work as a Team?
• Lesson 19 Does Fame Make You More Important?
• Lesson 20 Was Harry Potter the Hero of Hogwarts?
• References
• Index of Concepts
• References
• Photocopiable Masters
• Index
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