Inquiry-morphosis

It was that exciting week where me and MYP year 1 students were just adding our final reflections in our journal for the very first interdisciplinary project (Rain water harvesting) of the year and I had already started planning for our next unit. As I was a Middle Years Programme coordinator as well as Math-Science teacher for grade 6 in Ascend International School, I wanted to come up with another interdisciplinary project, this time taking up the topic of classification of plants and animals in Sciences and summarizing statistical distribution in Mathematics.

Using my understanding of backward planning for the unit, I started of thinking what might be the possible ways for my students to show their understanding of the concepts which will cover these topics. Considering that I will have to cover the topic of classification I was planning to include the key concepts of System in sciences and Logic in Mathematics. Interaction, representation and patterns were going to be the related concepts for this inquiry as I wanted my students to observe the patterns of similarities and differences in the organisms to help them understand the concept of the classification system. With this flexible plan in my mind I had decided to challenge myself to go with the flow of a student led inquiry! This was one of my professional teacher goals too ... to design projects which will have more student choice and voice!

I was trying to keep this unit as open as possible for students to come up with their own questions. Honestly I didn't even come up with a strong statement of inquiry which is the first requirement of our MYP unit planning. Nor did I plan for the summative task. I had decided to ask the students what they wanted to do! I was just thinking that may be they will classify the organisms in the vicinity of the school or create a small talk show for the younger students of the school or organize a nature trail for the pre-primary children. This sounded like cool yet doable manageable projects for me as a teacher-coordinator. I felt like the best thing to do is to design a very strong learning provocation and what would be a better way to do that than arranging for field trip in a nature park!

In Mumbai we are fortunate enough to have some good nature pockets in and around the city. Though people complain about the quality and utility of these places, I find these as resources, as food for thought for my students to think about how we can better these places. If they start whining about the discomfort they sense in these not-so well maintained places I just ask them, “So what do you think needs to change?” and with experience I have seen that students do a great reflection and also come up with authentic service ideas in such situations!

After much discussion about our field trip destination we zeroed in on this amazing place called "Ovalekar Wadi butterfly park" developed by a passionate teacher, Mr. Ovalekar himself. Students had seen some species of butterflies in our school garden like common mormon and the blue tiger but when they reached this park they were so excited to see a huge variety of butterflies just fluttering all over the place!

As the butterfly expert, Mr. Ketan Aloni explained how these insects need host plants for their caterpillars, most of my students were all ears to know what are some of the common host plants which they can grow. To our amazement these were just some easily available ones like the hibiscus, lemon tree, calotropis and also some commonly seen grass varieties!

Armed with their cameras and notepads they took notes and pictures of the plants as well as the butterflies.

Soon they just got talking about why only some of these butterflies are seen in our school garden. And then followed a series of questions: “Why are some butterflies hovering over the soil?”, “Why are the rotting fruits containers left around?”, “How do the butterflies help us?”, “If the caterpillars are eating plant leaves are they not pests?”

As we started our journey back to school from the park, I asked them, "So what do you think our next project should be?" Gushing with excitement they shared "Can we start our very own butterfly garden?" "I want Common Jeezbel to come to our school garden..I have also thought about which host and nectar plants I would like to grow!" "Would love to see swarm of the blue tigers just like we saw here! Is that possible with all the vehicle pollution that we have?"...OMG! You can just imagine my state of mind...on one hand I was contemplating the work which will go into all this... taking permissions from school authorities, getting the resources, soil and plants and on the other hand I was enjoying the learning which my students had done in those two hours at the park!

As we started our research, one student got really frustrated about how there were very few resources on the internet about butterflies and wondered why honey bee information was readily available.

That question went on our “Wonder wall” and suddenly he became so passionate about the butterflies because he started considering them as the underdogs of pollinator world! After few classes he shared that human beings are selfish species and hence they conduct research on honey bees to increase honey production but butterflies don’t directly help us to get any monetary gains! This was followed with an intense discussion and reflection on how all the factors are interconnected in nature! Wow...and I had not planned this in my unit plan yet what a great turn of events!

I had to forget my summative task which I had originally planned and we decided to write our story about how to make our own butterfly garden. We still covered our content standards of classification when we studied the butterflies, the host and the nectar plants specifically.

The students also did a statistical investigation to see whether their garden was actually making any difference in the butterfly population of our school. What was most important was that they learnt how to collaborate, how to persevere (when the butterflies didn't showed up initially), they learnt to research using books, internet and people, they learnt that learning can be fun! When some of them lost their sheets of statistical data, they learnt the lesson of organization and soon the sheets started finding their way to the folder without any reminders from me......finally! Yesss!  

Jobs were taken up to record the data, watering the garden, making butterfly feeders. Summative task further evolved into writing their observations about their chosen species of butterfly. This was the icing on the cake… they learnt that summative task can be fun!

For me, I learnt that I need to stand by at times to see learning happen and just be a facilitator!