The American Association of School Librarians Standards Framework for Learners are designed to provide a clear vision of “the qualities of well-prepared learners” to guide school librarians and administrators as they develop “curriculum tailored to…local priorities and needs.”
The AASL framework is anchored in six areas that progress through four domains: cognitive (Think), psychomotor (Create), affective (Share), and developmental (Grow).
Wixie provides a digital canvas your students can use to develop their abilities to Inquire as they:
“build new knowledge by inquiring, thinking critically, identifying problems, and developing strategies for solving problems.”
Inquire: Think
In the Think, or cognitive, domain of Inquire, “learners display curiosity and initiative” by:
1. Formulating questions about a personal interest or a curricular topic.
It seems like young children are always asking, “Why?” But many of our older students need to be pushed to take ownership of their inquiry and develop questions independently.
You can use several different graphic organizers in Wixie to encourage student questioning. Simply seeing the bubbles that need to be filled in a cluster organizer lets students quickly see your expectations. You can also use the I see, I think, I wonder and the Think-Puzzle-Explore templates to identify areas for questioning and stimulate their curiosity.
These templates can be assigned to students in Wixie by their teacher. Students can also access these supports on their own from their templates library.
Often, these organizers are used in response to an experience, text passage, visual, or video. Wixie makes it easy to include digital or non-tangible artifacts to page one of an assignment with a place to capture student thinking.
As students grow in their inquiry abilities, start with a blank Wixie page and ask students to type, sort, connect, and prioritize questions without structure or limits.
2. Recalling prior and background knowledge as context for new meaning.
New knowledge is constructed from previous knowledge. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have also demonstrated that the more familiar students are with prior knowledge, the easier it is for them to recall and work with new information.
It is common to use a KWL chart to prompt students to share what they Know about a topic. This organizer also prompts students to come up with questions about additional information they Want to know and provides a place to retell or restate what they have Learned. Assigning the KWL in Wixie makes it easy to review student work from any device to identify misconceptions and provide feedback on student thinking.
Many educators also design anticipation guides for topics they are introducing in the classroom. Anticipation templates in Wixie, like the one above, can be easily adjusted with statements about a topic and then assigned to students to read and answer based on prior knowledge.
Building foundations for powerful inquiry
The goal of inquiry is to not only get students to ask questions, but to begin thinking critically about a problem and solution. Project-based learning provides an effective model to engage students in deep thinking, while connecting their learning to real world problems and issues.
The supports and organizers in Wixie can help you successfully implement a project-based approach to learning.
• An Empathy Organizer prompts students to question a topic in the context of a problem to be solved and provides a creative approach for tapping into and identifying prior knowledge.
• A 5 Whys organizer helps students find root issues to problems they are exploring.
Using organizers and scaffolds allows you to coach learners through a project-based or design-thinking process without telling them exactly what to do or think. As they grow in their skills, empower students to choose which scaffolds to use to further transfer responsibility for learning to your students.
