Gr. 9 Unit 1: Why Learn?

Why Learn?

We started a new unit today and our focus question is:

What would you change about education and the school system to improve your future?

We defined two key terms today; "education" and "school system".  Here's what grade 9's thought:

Education is a personal collection of knowledge acquired through learning, research and life experiences.

A School system is how a group of schools operate under the guidance of the superintendent, principals and teachers using curriculum and schedules to help students graduate from one level to the next.

We used a discussion strategy to generate lists of differences between education and schools.

Here are a few ideas from Grade 9's:

We watched Suli Breaks' video, "Why I love education but hate school" to think about our opinions about school and education.

We have analysed (SEEing) and interpreted (THINKing) this poem in small groups.  Using a 1st, 2nd, 3rd draft reading of the poem.  See the image below:

  

Next, we'll take our thinking and summaries and represent them by creating powerful newspaper headlines.

Students examined headlines from online newspapers to identify techniques they could imitate in their own headlines.

Some of our observations were:

 Examples of headlines can be found in Google Classroom.

Students will use these Newspaper Headlines to structure their presentations.  See the organizer below:

We have been examining issues in education by discussing articles.

Students brainstormed ideas on assessment and grading practices in school by completing a carousel activity.

• Students worked in groups to note the positives and negatives for each assessment tool.  
• Then we presented the top 2 pro's and con's for each.  
• We also proposed changes to the tool based on the con's.  

See some of their observations below:

Tests

Presentations

Projects

Writing

Learning Logs

Discussions

Portfolios

We completed a free write on our school experiences involving assessments.  We thought about what we liked / disliked and what we felt needed changing to these assessment tools.

Today we began setting a purpose for our reading.  As we are forming opinions we decided we would use PNI to help us select items for group discussion.

P - positive (items we agree with)

N - negative (items we disagree with)

I - interesting (items we want to understand or talk about more)

We selected 3 or 4 items for possible discussion and noted our thinking about the item.  WHY it was positive, negative or interesting.

Mrs. Anderson and student volunteers modeled 1st Turn / Last Turn Discussion Strategy and then students discussed the rest of the article in groups of 3.

See process below: