I have always used essential questions and tried to foster inquiry in my lessons and units, but before I read Get it Done!, I had never heard of or purposefully used the Five Kinds of Knowledge. Without knowing it, I had of course touched on each of them--it's hard to teach anything without using them, whether you're doing it on purpose or not!
The thing is, I wasn't developing the five kinds of knowledge very effectively. They were usually part of separate, disconnected lessons in my class. One day, we would learn about the context and reasons for learning. The next, we would do some pre-reading activities that dealt with procedural knowledge of substance. Then, I would abandon most of those things as soon as we got to the actual material, and explicitly teach mostly declarative knowledge of substance. At the end of a unit, sometimes weeks later, when we got to procedural and declarative knowledge of form, I would find that my students no longer had any idea why we were even doing this or what our essential questions were.
I am planning on changing that in my classroom next year. I am going to try to use the five kinds of knowledge to build on each other, to work together to help students generate knowledge for themselves through inquiry. That's really what I was trying to do all along, but without knowing how to make it work.
Questions for Discussion:
What are your experiences with the Five Kinds of Knowledge? Do you agree with all of them, or would you add or remove some of them? Do you have any strategies you use that help students make and communicate meaning?
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