Reflecting against inquiry goals: 'To develop reflective capabilities in visual art students' & 'To use a knowledge building approach to engage online learners'

At the moment I am working on developing template that give students prompts for reflection, as I found students wrote well about their work when there were scaffolds around the reflection to guide them.
I think this is necessary, it is quite a skill to reflect about your thinking or your progress.
I know that I need guiding questions for inquiry.  My entire Master's thesis question and methodology set out the plan for my inquiry and gave me a set of criteria to reflect against. This took a large chunk of time and stress to develop and I am an educated adult.
I think inquiry and reflection need to be taught and supported. If I throw my students into an inquiry with no/little guidance, this is like putting a kid on a bike for the first time with no training wheels. They are going to fall over.

Ultimately I want my students to have epistemic agency - but there is a lot of learning and development to get to that stage. This is a goal that will sit over multiple years of inquiry.

Learner agency - who drives the learning?

I've been thinking about learner agency and who drives the learning. My online art history class uses a knowledge building approach. For us, this looks like lots of discussion, lots of student led activity, and generally working as a bit of research team. We're always trying to delve deeper into ideas to improve everyone's understanding.

Last week we had a power cut at my school during the scheduled video conference time. I was able to email my students on my cell phone to let them know to work together online without me using the structure on the class blog as a guide. I had a response from a student (I'm paraphrasing here) letting me know that she had tried to elicit a bit of verbal korero, but the others weren't comfortable taking the lead in the VC without my guidance.

This got me to thinking, have I unconsciously made the video conferences too teacher-centric? Or is this just the kind of learners I have this year? I am conscious that I am pushing a lot of their boundaries and expectations of what learning is.

Teachers using a Knowledge Building approach what are your thoughts?

Engagement in my classroom

Just a few reflections on engagement and what it looks like in the classroom.

Knowledge Building video article

I wanted to share a video article I made for the NetNZ annual report around Knowledge Building.

So a little bit of background. Part of my job is to teach level 3 art history online with NetNZ.
Over the last couple of years, I've been working with a model called Knowledge Building Communities in art history and inquiring into how this can engage and extend a diverse range of learners from a diverse range of schools.

So this is my first attempt at making a blog style video and I have to say it felt a bit vulnerable to put myself out there in such a public forum. That said if you watch it and it sparks some kind of interest, I would welcome any questions or indeed feedback.

NB If you're interested in reading more about Knowledge Building feel free to check out my appraisal website, I based my inquiry around the work I'm doing with Knowledge Building and have heaps of background info about the big ideas and how it works on there.