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Planning for a Learner- Inquiry Based Design can be challenging at times as its difficult to do any planning ahead.  The curriculum should be focused on the students needs, interests and curiosities.  Sowell (2015) states that the students become active members in the education process when they help to select and organize the purpose for learning.

One inquiry that the students lead in my Kindergarten classroom was "catching bad guys".  My co teacher and I sat down with the students and discussed how we could further the learning and embed this into our classroom activities.  Our brainstorm came up with creating a jail in the dramatic play area, we took a mug shot and finger printed each student.  We brought in books about community helpers and visited the police station.  Our KWL charts were displayed for parents and administration.  Every student was able to take charge of their learning and felt heard as we collaborated in our classroom, the learning goals.

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Listen to the students voice.  Approaches to a learner- inquiry based design in your instruction requires the educator to take a step back and be a facilitator.  Your instruction for extending the learning can take many avenues such as oral discussions, the use of technology, providing resources to the students, guiding their learning through debates, and questions.  Be and active listener to your students and they will tell you how they learn best and what it is they want to know.

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McMillan (2014) states that "as a teacher you will be responsible for assessing what students

in your classroom have learned, essentially gathering evidence of student learning and using that evidence to document and, hopefully, promote student

motivation and achievement." In a learner based design the assessment needs to be relevant to the expectations the students have demonstrated within their inquiry.  This usually entails a cross curricular approach to knowing the curriculum documents and frequently reviewing what each student has learned and demonstrated.

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In agreement with Shepard (2000),there is a close relationship between truly understanding a concept and being able to transfer knowledge and use it in new situations. In contrast to memorization—and in contrast to the behaviorist assumption that each application must be taught as a separate learning objective—true understanding is flexible, connected, and generalizable. Not surprisingly, research studies demonstrate that learning is more likely to transfer if students have the opportunity to practice with a variety of applications while learning (Bransford, 1979).

Finding out what the students already know about the topic is key. Making the material relevant, hands on, and  capturing their interest is essential when teaching students about past and present society and cultural issues, norms, and traditions.

Plan for topics that are relevant to the students life as they are the driving force behind improving our society.

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In relation to Indigenizing Education the beginning of change does not have to wait for regulations or funding from the higher ups and political standing.  Although curricular standards and appropriate resources will be essential to systemic change.
Having guest speakers, into the classrooms would be benefical for all.  Organize a filed trip, and even having a variety of books, posters and samples of items relevant to your topic will help.

The focus for implementation is on our rapidly changing society and how we can teach students to become productive members of said society.  Ensure your instruction includes opportunities for the students to think outside the box and problem solve so they can be involved in the necessary change.

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Assessment in a society- culture based design can be observations, presentations, self assessments and student lead projects.  As McMillan (2014) points out "teaching, which includes the use of student assessment, is most effective
when these powerful contextual forces are aligned with what the teacher is doing in the classroom. When your teaching and assessment are aligned to what we know about how students learn, achievement and motivation are enhanced.
Assessment is imperative. Accurate and appropriate student assessment provides the information to help

teachers make better decisions. In the classroom context, then, classroom assessment

is gathering, interpreting, and using evidence of student learning and motivation to support

teacher decision making in a variety of ways:

• Diagnosing of student strengths, weaknesses, misunderstandings, and learning errors

• Monitoring of student effort and progress toward proficiency

• Documenting student learning

• Improving student learning, motivation, and 21st century skills and dispositions

• Assigning grades

• Providing feedback to parents
[McMillan, 2014]

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Subject-based planning should focus on:

• assessing meaningful learning using high-quality measures tied to standards

• using assessment data to help better prepare teachers and schools for subject reform
(Hayes, 2003)

In our readings and throughout the course, subject-matter design has faced some criticism in regards to how it can be inflexible to curriculum differentiation and locks some students into limited outcomes from schooling. Vigilant alignment of local concerns with the broader subject goals, similar to Orstein and Hunkins (2013) proposed broad-fields design, can help remedy this issue.

Some suggestions to subject-matter design have been made to help it better align with the systems of schooling.

1. A curriculum that is attuned to local concerns but informed by broader agreements on standards

2. Using assessment to support learning

3. Using assessment to support pedagogy

4. Assessing meaningful learning using high-quality standards, supplemented by local indicators of learning

5. Co-construction: Including stakeholders in the construction of curriculum (ties to learner-based learning)

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Teachers act as a facilitator of discussion and instruction in this model. As she described inquiry-based learning, Cathy Coumont-Golanowski described how group work assisted in obtaining a more natural feel and how they pulled in other subject areas to strengthen their units.

Careful resource selection would “help educators make appropriate decisions about which of these resources might be appropriate for use with their students... [and] that meet provincial standards related to literacy as well as a variety of specific subject areas”. (Castellon, 2017)

There exists some parallels are well with behaviorism, where learning as the accumulation of stimulus-response associations. It assumes that because learning occurs by accumulating atomized bits of knowledge, instruction should:

Be tightly sequenced and hierarchical

Focus on teaching each objective explicitly to overcome limited transfer of knowledge

Use tests should be used frequently to ensure mastery before proceeding to the next objective

(Shepard, 2004)

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Prior knowledge. Students come from different educational background, which can hinder the hierarchal progression through a subject-matter design. Open discussion to assess the coherent version of students' reasoning and relevant experiences and can help teachers to learn about the resources brought by students from diverse communities.

Assessment in subject-centered design should be transparent so that students have a clear understanding of the criteria, including the features of an excellent performance (Shepard, 2004).With opportunities for self-reflection, students can learn to evaluate their own work in the same way that their teachers would.

Another method used to measure student performance under subject-matter design is through quality constructed-responses. Written or orally, students create their own answer in response to a question or task. Brief constructed-response items are those in which students provide a short, clearly delineated answer (McMillan, 2014).

When students must learn large, detailed amounts of related subject-matter, essays can be used effectively to assess knowledge and understanding. Because performance assessments are time intensive for teachers and students, they are usually not the best choice for assessing vast amounts of knowledge.

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With several overlaps with reconstructionist design, problem-centered design places a large emphasis on solving real-world issues through the perspective of the student. According to Castellon (2017), educators should create transformational learning experiences by

reaching out to local communities and starting a dialogue

noticing the problems, disparities, and injustices to facilitate inquiry-based learning

avoid over-generalizing curriculum

Shepard (2004) explains how school learning should be authentic and connected to the world outside of school to make learning more interesting and motivating to students. It also develops the ability to use knowledge in real-world settings. This approach to planning could help develop cognitive competency and life-skills, such as persistence and problem solving.

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In alignment with the values of reconstructionist conceptions, authentic instruction, as described by Hayes (2003) addresses and attempts to solve real-world, life situations. Learning focuses on the construction of knowledge and utilizing disciplined inquiry. Shepard (2004) states that the most obvious reform has been to devise more open-ended performance tasks to ensure that students are able to reason critically, to solve complex problems, and to apply their knowledge in real-world contexts.

The Ursula Franklin Academy (UFA) shares several overlaps with problem-centered design with its inclusion of inquiry-based learning, where students are encouraged to think like a scientists in how they solve different relevant problems or issues in the curriculum. UFA follows Core Values in its instruction such as:

Creating/Being a Community of Learners

Connected Knowledge

A Spirit of Inquiry

Democracy

Social Justice

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Because students all present individualized outcomes and skills, performance assessments are an effective method of assessment. A well-defined task is identified, and students are asked to create, produce, or do something, often in settings that involve real-world application of knowledge and skills and their proficiency is demonstrated by providing an extended response. Selected-response and brief constructed-response tests can be used to assess student procedural knowledge of the skills, including knowing the proper sequence of a skill (McMillan, 2014). Additionally, teachers constantly observe students informally to assess student understanding and their progress through the problem-solving centered approach.

Assessment should be dynamic and ongoing. As learners work through various problems,  assessment should be moved into the middle of the teaching and learning process instead of being postponed as only the end-point of instruction.

Testing may not be as strongly emphasized in this design. John Ralston Saul explain how a testing society implies that people would not follow the rules if you did not keep them in line but a problem-solving centered design encourages open-ended thinking where learners can rewrite or re evaluate preset rules.

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Castellon, A. (2017). A Call to Personal Research: Indigenizing Your Curriculum [Abstract]. The Canadian for Teacher Research. Retrieved July 22, 2018, from http://www.teacherresearch.ca/blog/article/2017/05/28/324-a-call-to-personal-research-indigenizing-your-curriculum

Exploring Big Questions: A Teacher's P.O.V. on Starting Inquiry-Based Learning in the Classroom.  [Online] Retrived July 25, 2018 from https://vimeo.com/85470752

Hayes, D. (2003) Making learning an effect of schooling: aligning curriculum, assessment and pedagogy, Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 24(2), 225-245

McMillan, J. H. (2014).  Classroom assessment: Principles and practice for effective standards-based instruction (6th ed., pp. 1-20,  57-64,74-88). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Ralston Saul, J. (2018, July 22). John Ralston Saul: Where is the Standardized Testing Trend Taking Us? Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/28412154

Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4-14. doi:10.3102/0013189X029007004

Ursula Franklin Academy. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://schoolweb.tdsb.on.ca/ufa/

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Planning the curriculum to align with curriculum and pedagogy can be done through backward or forward mapping. Forward mapping begins at the beginning of the lesson, a statement of the educator’s intent, and proceeds through a sequence of steps to define what is expected overall from teachers in the end. Conversely, backward mapping begins with a statement of the goal at the lowest level of the implementation process. Only after that goal is described does the teacher break it down to a smaller outcomes or evidence of learning and then further into lessons.

More on backward mapping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTv2HR2ckto

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According to Hayes (2003), instruction should be moulded so students possess:

• skills in analysis and problem solving and the ability to communicate ideas, to plan and organie activities and to collaborate with others

• the capacity to exercise judgement and responsibility in matters of morality, ethics and social justice

• the capacity to think about how things got to be the way they are, and to be active and informed citizens

• employment-related skills, the use of technology and the ability to contribute to ecologically sustainable development.

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Shepard (2003) described solid assessment as

A shared vision: Makes explicit what is to be learned

A learning culture: Make assessment more informative, insightfully tied to learning steps, and change the social meaning of evaluation.

Feedback: Ignore errors when they are inconsequential to the solution process and offering hints or asking leading questions so students can reach correct conclusions themselves. Intervene with more direction instruction when more subtle, student self-corrected tactics have failed to maintain student motivation and self-confidence.

Transfer: Learning is more likely to transfer if students have the opportunity to practice with a variety of applications while learning. Good assessment constantly asks about old understandings in new ways, calls for new applications, and draws new connections.

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Is there a trend to unfairly label academic instruction and assessment biases onto subject-matter design? 

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Is there a trend to unfairly label academic instruction and assessment biases onto subject-matter design? 

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As an educator do you do focus on more assessment of learning or for learning?  Why?

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As an educator do you do focus on more assessment of learning or for learning?  Why?

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Are rubrics one of your most used form of assessment tools?  

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Are rubrics one of your most used form of assessment tools?  