ABC OF INQUIRY - DEEPER LEARNING Teachers' Inquiry Dictionary

ABC OF INQUIRY – DEEPER LEARNING

ABC OF INQUIRY – DEEPER LEARNING “…and their minds were opened and their imagination’s stirred, and they saw wonderful things in their secret selves that few of them had ever dreamed of….”– River Murray Mary Colin Theile

DEEPER LEARNING: Digging deeper…

Deeper learning has occurred when a learner understands an idea or skill so thoroughly that they can use the rigours of this knowledge to adapt it, transfer it and/or use it in new ways.

For example, if a learner uses drills to learn their time tables to develop quick recall to answer sums, they have a surface understanding of multiplication, a simple set of answers to call on quickly. This quick recall has a place and a use in the real world. However if a learner has the opportunity to develop an understanding of grouping and regrouping in patterns and to explore multiplicative thinking, they will understand how they arrived at their answers in the basic times tables, while also being able to use these understandings to solve more complex problems and adapt their understandings to develop algebraic thinking strategies. By understanding how multiplication works, the learner has more than surface knowledge, they* have a deeper knowledge and understanding of the multiplication operation.

Teaching for deeper learning, requires the teacher to have a thorough understanding of the subject content so they* can deconstruct it themselves in order to see the parts the students will need to understand.

Often learners who are able to do something faster or more effectively than their peers are given challenges or extension work that takes them onto the next step or stage in a process. however it may be more worthwhile to ensure that there is a deeper level of understanding and to set extension work that digs deeper into an idea rather than pushes it up to the next step.

*”BCW uses ‘they- themself’ as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun in all subsequent material generated on our website.

BCW will now use ‘They — themself’ as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun in all subsequent material generated on our website.

BeConWiz Ideas and Thoughts by Carla Holmes, Mary-Denese Holmes, Pearl Holmesis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://beconwiz.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://beconwiz.com.