Our Question:

Will developing our provocations help children become more engaged and motivated in their own learning.

What have I found out?

As I only started my PARTS project  seven weeks ago I feel as though I am still figuring out the big idea of Investigations. In terms of provocations though I have found that not all students are using them effectively and deepening their learning. Through our discussions we looked at how this may be due to every child being at different developmental stages. We can still engage every student in the provocations by using those who do use them effectively as freebies, sharing their thinking and investigating strategies with the others.

I have also found out that a provocation can be just about anything as long as it has clear purpose and is placed in a way that will spark a child’s curiosity. Through our project we have included provocations such as ‘You Can Do It’ puppets, dice, books, planners and most importantly teacher questioning. I think working together on developing provocations definitely made a difference to how engaging they were as we able to brainstorm what would work and how it should be placed as a team.

What’s next?

Hopefully next will be starting to put regular routines in place in terms of working together to help to make the Statement of Intent, learning spaces and provocation planning easier and more effective. For the students, I would like to push their thinking deeper still by consistently adding purposeful provocations and challenges to each area so they are encouraged further to investigate and explore. By doing this I would hope that they are still working with past learning intentions as well as the new focuses. I think in the future for me personally I want to focus on getting to know the whole Walker Learning Approach better so that I can better understand how the children will best be engaged.