This book offers a chapter from Trevor Mackenzie's full book on amplifying learning and empowering student voice.

Dive Into Enquiry Microbook

A series of books that impact teaching and empower learning, these are excerpts from published books that offer a "microlearning" opportunity.

Microbooks

Take a look at Chantaille’s authentic piece here:

challenged them along the way, the authentic piece is the culmination of our scaffolding through the Types of Student Inquiry.

How can we learn from the past to understand the present world? | Chantaille Ash

These examples, as well as others shared throughout this book, demonstrate how student understanding can be shared to an authentic audience whilst also meeting the learning standards of a specific course. Combined with a first person narrative account of how their essential question is meaningful to them, what they learned about their essential question throughout their Free Inquiry unit, and what 

Task #5: Get other people’s eyes on your learning.

For some students, this is the first time their learning is being shared with someone outside of our classroom, and it’s a huge and awesome step for them in the creation of the authentic piece. Prying open the door to the classroom it allows others to see the learning taking place

These conversations inevitably provide highly meaningful, specific feedback and direction for completing their authentic piece.

Prying open the door to the classroom allows others to see the learning taking place in their Free Inquiry unit.

in their Free Inquiry unit. It also reflects a hurdle they all face when getting prepared to publicly display their learning, and it allows students to test run whether their efforts to hook their audience are successful. I encourage students to ask their audience these questions:

I encourage all students to create a slick, professional, and innovative authentic piece. When discussing the authentic piece, these are great adjectives to use because they inevitably lead to rich discussions about assessing how a performance task meets these criteria. What makes one authentic piece slick may be something entirely different from what makes another slick. For example, students creating a video to summarise their learning might use

Want to make learning more meaningful in your classroom? Looking to better prepare your students for the world of tomorrow? Keen to help learners create authentic connections to the world around them?

ith Dive into Inquiry you’ll gain an  understanding  of  how  to  best  support

your learners as they shift from a traditional learning model into the inquiry classroom where student agency is fostered and celebrated each and every day. This book strikes a perfect balance of meaningful pedagogy, touching narrative, helpful processes, original student examples, and rich how-to lesson plans all to get you going on bringing inquiry into your classroom.

After reading this book educators will feel equipped to design their own inquiry units in a scaffolded manner that promote a gradual shift of control of learning from the teacher to the learner. Exploring student passions, curiosities, and interests and having these shape essential questions, units of study, and performance tasks are all covered in this powerful book. Learn to keep track of the many inquiry topics in your classroom and have students take ownership over their learning like never before!

AMPLIFY LEARNING AND EMPOWER STUDENT VOICE

I keep them for years and share them with students preparing for their own Free Inquiry unit, colleagues considering initiating an inquiry process in their own classroom, on social media, and with my Personal Learning Network (“PLN”) on Twitter, or at workshops and conferences across the continent.

Authentic pieces inspire and resonate. I keep them for years and share them often.

erhaps the most meaningful step for students in the Free Inquiry process is 

creating something to reflect their understanding of their essential question. I love this time. If scaffolded properly using the Types of Student Inquiry, the tenets of Understanding by Design, and a strongly structured and supported Free Inquiry unit, students’ authentic pieces inspire and resonate.

Authentic pieces begin with students genuinely deciding how they want to demonstrate their understanding. I ask them, “If you could demonstrate your understanding in any way, what would it be? Are you really good at something you feel would help communicate your understanding of your essential question?” Inevitably, these questions lead students to consider authentic pieces to simultaneously reflect their learning and engage an audience.

Inquiry is the dynamic process of being open to wonder and puzzlements and coming to know and understand the world.

&nbsp;—Alberta Focus on Inquiry, 2004

Inquiry-based learning is a process where students are involved in their learning, create essential questions, investigate widely, and then build new understandings, meanings, and knowledge. That knowledge is new to the students and may be used to answer their essential question, to develop a solution, or to support a position or point of view. The knowledge is usually presented to others in some sort of a public manner and may result in some sort of action.

Types of Student Inquiry is a scaffolded approach to inquiry in the classroom, one that gradually increases student agency over learning whilst providing learners with the necessary skills, knowledge, and understanding to be successful in their inquiry.

Task #3: Self-assess and revise as you go.

where they need to be in the coming days of the unit, and then plan backward to ensure they close the gap between the two.

Using the co-designed criteria we have built for their performance task and asking themselves a few reflection questions, students self-assess as they build their authentic piece.

Am I on track to achieve a performance task with which I will be happy?

Is my learning meeting or exceeding the expectations I’ve set out for myself? How can I tell?

Task #4: Hook your audience on what you have learned.

What, in my view, can I change to make my authentic piece better?

What are three steps I can take to make my authentic piece awesome?

Since students are actively creating their authentic piece, the criteria cannot holistically assess their learning yet. However, they can prompt students to reflect where they currently are with their authentic piece,

I ask students to keep in mind the energy they originally felt when planning their inquiry—whether it was their passionate drive, their aim for a goal, their will to take on a new challenge, or their unceasing curiosity—and remember their audience needs to feel this as well. Essential questions and their Free Inquiry unit plan are both highly meaningful to each student. We don’t, however, want this meaning and zest for learning to be lost in an authentic piece with no hook for the audience.

Once you've read this microbook excerpt, you'll want to get the full book! Use the link below.

Microbooks pick up on the idea of microlearning, a concept that's <a href="https://www.hollyclark.org/2019/02/11/5-ways-microlearning-is-revolutionizing-education/">revolutionizing education</a> by offering short bursts of learning that can initiate exposure, interaction, knowledge construction and reflection for teachers. Elevate Books Edu and Book Creator have teamed up to bring you a series of microbooks that impact teaching and empower learning. These books will offer a glimpse into some of the most popular concepts and ideas in education today, with a link to buy the full book if you like what you see and want to continue the journey.

When we include self-assessment of their learning, we take student agency to another level.

When students can build the assessment piece of the performance task, they are more easily able to recognise how to make improvements and revisions to their work. Further, I find students are more likely to achieve a performance task they are happy with—one meeting or exceeding the criteria we’ve built—because creating it gives them a clear and deep understanding of how to do well. Prior to their learning being published, I ask students to self-assess their authentic piece using this co-constructed criteria. During this process, I witness students revising and enhancing their authentic piece in powerful ways. The pride they take in their learning and the attention to detail they demonstrate when self-assessing is something that cannot be replicated in any other assessment strategy.

Co-constructing criteria seems daunting. With close to thirty students in a single class working on potentially unique, authentic pieces, the hesitancy of some educators to open up their classrooms to Free Inquiry is understandable. But by the time we get to our Free Inquiry unit, students are well prepared for the responsibility and ownership of their learning. Plus, I utilise some methods to help me best meet the needs of my students.

Likely, the authentic piece a student has decided to create to demonstrate their understanding has been previously created and assessed by someone else. As such, I always encourage my students to find pre-existing criteria—close to what students want to create—to get the conversation started. We research and narrow our scope to a few final rubrics students feel could lend powerful language, a strong scope, and solid sequencing to assessing their authentic piece. I then ask them to revise what they’ve found, taking out what doesn’t quite fit with their vision and adding

slick, professional, and innovative to describe transitions or the sharpness of images or the innovative use of the platform with which they’re working. On the other hand, students creating a public presentation of their learning may use those adjectives to mean giving attention to pacing and enunciation, playing with emphasis on words and body language, and overall presence and energy. These discussions about putting the final touches on their authentic pieces always lead to polished performance tasks and an end result students will be proud of.

Julia’s authentic piece can be viewed here:

Macbeth | A Passage Analysis

When students effectively complete these six tasks, their effort is reflected in an outstanding authentic piece. For example, Julia chose to create a video using <a href="https://www.videoscribe.co">VideoScribe</a> to reflect her understanding of Shakespeare’s Macbeth from our Guided Inquiry unit. She wanted to answer the essential question, How can ambition be both a good and bad trait?

Another fantastic example comes from Chantaille. Chantaille chose to create a video using <a href="https://explaineverything.com/">Explain Everything</a> to reflect her understanding of a science humaines class (French immersion social studies) from our Guided Inquiry unit focusing on comparing and contrasting Victorian-era values with present day contemporary values. She used her understanding to answer the essential question, How can we learn from the past to understand the present world?

I always ask students to connect their authentic piece to the learning standards of our course. Their piece must summarise their learning and reflect, to an extent, the must-know content our course demands. In my English classes, this can look like a personal narrative essay. In science classes, it might look like following the scientific method. In social studies classes, it can be an essential question explored through a specific time period or historical event. In math classes, it can look like mathematical problem solving, strategies, and equations from the course curriculum. Regardless of what students design for their authentic piece, they must abide by these criteria. I assess this requirement is met during the one-on-one meeting I have with each student when I review their proposal and look for evidence that their authentic piece fits into the learning objectives of the course. When I have seen inquiry fall short, it’s due, in part, to the gap between the voice and choice provided to students and the course curriculum

and learning standards of the grade level. By ensuring their Free Inquiry unit and, more specifically, their performance task (i.e., authentic piece) is up to this standard, I am closing this gap. Throughout their Free Inquiry unit, students are gathering learning evidence to scaffold the creation of this authentic piece. Now it is time to put it all together. I ask students to complete a few tasks to help guide them to a successful performance task and deepen their understanding of their essential question.

Task #1: Co-construct criteria for the authentic piece.

Shortly after students meet with me to pitch their proposal, we spend time co-constructing criteria for their authentic piece. Clearly, student ownership over their learning witnessed during our school year is powerful, but I believe when we include student self-assessment of their learning, we take this agency to another level.

Trevor MacKenzie is an award winning English teacher at Oak Bay High School in Victoria, BC, Canada, who believes that it is a magical time to be an educator. By increasing student agency over learning, weaving in strong pedagogy, transformative tech use, and sharing learning to a public audience, Trevor’s learners are ready to take on important roles in the 21st century.

Trevor is the author of Dive into Inquiry: Amplify Learning and Empower Student Voice as well as <a href="https://www.trevormackenzie.com/inquiry-mindset">Inquiry Mindset: Nurturing the Dreams, Wonders and Curiosities of our Youngest Learners</a> (co-authored with Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt) published by Elevate Books Edu.

Blog: <a href="https://www.trevormackenzie.com">trevormackenzie.com</a>

<a href="https://twitter.com/trev_mackenzie">@trev_mackenzie</a>

<a href="https://trevormackenzie.com/contact">trevormackenzie.com/contact</a>

missing details. The end result is a working draft of criteria students may decide to use to self-assess their authentic piece.

With these reflections in mind, we revisit the working draft and add any powerful language or details students feel is necessary in their criteria.

Look at other people’s work and take note of what you want.

I absolutely love asking students to show me the “gold standard” of their authentic piece. I challenge them to find examples of work they deem to be professional quality. We then discuss the work in detail through a few discussion prompts. I ask students the following questions:

Task #2: Step back and review your learning evidence.

What are five specific, exceptionally executed details?

How do you want to emulate the example you found?

What challenges do you foresee in achieving an authentic piece of similar quality?

At this point, I encourage students to step away from the incredible learning they’ve done in their Free Inquiry unit and review their learning evidence from start to finish. I ask them to look for the key points they’d like to communicate to their audience and find those aha moments in their research. And I ask them to identify where the big idea of their essential question comes to the surface. These details help them decide what needs to come across to their audience in their authentic piece.

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