Welcome to this KB Minutes blog! KB stands for Knowledge Building.
You’ve come here probably because you are interested in turning your own classroom into a powerful community of knowledge builders or helping other educators to make this change. This change requires teachers to turn more classroom control over to students, so the inquiry processes will be primarily driven by student-generated questions and deepening ideas.
This will lead to new classroom dynamics in which core decisions about learning goals, processes, and organizational structures will be co-improvised by the teacher with students. As a new type of classroom discourse, the teacher works with his/her students to engage in authentic idea-advancing conversations to deepen their understandings while finding deeper problems, goals, and connections. So we call it “metacognitive meetings” considering the high-level metacognitive operations that the class as a whole needs to collectively handle.
On this stage of collaborative improvisation, the teacher has a critical role to play!
Using this blog of KB Minutes, we will collect and share a set of examples of how teachers empower their young knowledge builders to continually go beyond what they know and connect with their peers to develop powerful thinking. Each post will highlight a classroom episode that showcases a specific role played by the teacher to support productive knowledge-building conversation. The teachers’ words may seem simple, but they send important messages that empower students’ agency for continually deepening their dialogues and advancing their inquiry to higher levels.
- Teacher talk #1: Co-Shaping and deepening the Focus: I’m interested in what x said about…, he/she said that… I wonder…
- Teacher talk #2: Deepening the conversation: I don’t understand…
- Teacher talk #3: Advertising high-potential ideas and work: X said something that was so amazing!
- Teacher talk #4: Guiding attention: That is such a great question!
- Teacher talk #5: Connecting diverse expertise: Who’s studying…?
Idea Thread Mapper 