Starting to Organize Data

Today, I gave the students access to the raw data. Wow - it was interesting how they started sifting through the information. This was the most challenging day for me in terms of stepping back and letting them develop ways to organize the data on their own. I wanted to shout "Just make a tally chart!" but watched as students made lists, developed their own codes, highlight and colour information, and discuss unexpected results ("Wow - this kid took 25 seconds for the reaction time question! I wonder why?"). I did see some students making tallies, using tables to organize their data, and even calculating the mean and median of their data (well they were figuring out a way to do this anyway). After about 15 minutes, I let the class know that they were allowed to walk around and check out how other groups are organizing their data and could ask questions to these other students if needed.

Below is a vine of today's exploration:

We didn't have any technology available today (so much for "leveraging digital"!) but in a sense I found the students were able to focus on the data and organization methods as opposed to worrying about formatting and tech issues. I ended up handing out a pocket portfolio to each group for them to store all of their work.

It was certainly an interesting experience. I didn't realize that "teacher-directed" was such an integral part of my teaching approaches. This is one more step towards letting my students direct their learning (moving from lecturer to facilitator).

I am sort of wondering where to go from this point... is it time for some student sharing, establishing co-constructed anchor charts, and some additional teacher prompting... or do I give it some more time and see what the students do? Tomorrow we have about 30 minutes to keep working through the data but I will give each group a Chromebook and a link to the data to see how they use the technology to help sift through.