Crime

A teacher, Keline, showed two trigger videos to her class in order for them to generate ideas on the topic of ‘Crime’.

Both videos were trailers to Crime Watch episodes, with the first clip showing scenes of people running, abandoning their gloves, and being caught by police. The second clip showed a knife, robbers who tied up their victims, and CCTV footage. 

Students first wrote down their ideas on a 'see think wonder' worksheet. After this individual idea generation, Keline got her students to share their ideas with one another. When similar ideas were brought up, she taught the class how to scaffold their ideas to build onto their friends’ ideas; for instance, using the line “I would like to build on _________’s idea”. She also taught students to use the ‘New information’ and ‘Putting our ideas together’ scaffold to write down new ideas they heard from their friends and to come up with better, more complete ideas. 

In this way, Keline incorporated the KB pedagogy into her lesson without using KF.

Magnets

A teacher, Eunice, was covering the topic of magnets with her students. Her trigger activity was to have students conduct an experiment involving a freely hanging magnet and another magnet on hand.

Prior to this lesson, students had observed a freely hanging magnet and the direction in which the magnet came to rest in. They were instructed to predict the results of the experiment, which they wrote on a worksheet. 

Students consequently conducted the experiment, with Eunice prompting them to feel how the magnets react when put together (Fig. 1). Afterwards, the class had a verbal discussion of the experiment before students went online to KF to post their observations, thoughts, and ideas (Fig. 2).

Fig 1. Students conducting the experiment.

Fig 2. KF view 'Characteristics of magnets' for Eunice's class.

Materials

Elizabeth and Fadil split the students into groups and gave them various objects to classify. The students were encouraged to come to a consensus as a group, and if there were other individual alternative views, to put those on hold.

The classification was varied, with some classifying according to the materials used while others classified according to the function of the objects (e.g.: household item, cutlery)

Fire

After going through the school’s slides and content coverage for the topic, both Angela and Beth set their students out to complete group compositions.

Under the voting scaffold ‘I chose this because’, students were to read all the groups’ compositions and post a note on the view of the group composition which they liked the best. They were also prompted to state their reasons for their choice, as well as to quote phrases from the original piece to support their stand.