First day back and first try at Guided Inquiry Learning

This is the first day of term 2. I had prepared a Guided Inquiry Learning Sheet for each of my 4 classes from 14 to 16 year olds. These were based on the POGIL worksheets and I tried to use these in the way I saw at the POGIL workshop. The year 10 class was a class with reading difficulties. So I had not taken this into account sufficiently well. The text was "textbook" style and the questions were not graded towards a conclusion and only involved comprehension of the text; no problem solving skills were needed. There was no "ah-ha" moment at the end; no single insight into how reproduction works. However the class worked well. The cooperative Learning was meant to happen when the students compared their individual answers in a group of 3 students. I did not really help that happen, and I suspect this is something students need to learn. The low stream Science class, learning about electric circuits, and the chemistry class, learning about quantitative chemistry, did better at helping each other, and working out the concepts. However it is not easy for me to write these structured tasks and it really makes me think about the way I teach and explain ideas. I had some questions about significant figures and should think of a way of them using a ruler to understand these - rather than having "rules" about when to count the zeros. One student told me "good learning today" so the approach oviously worked for one student. I must persist at this.