• ENV
• 7-11
• Urmson
• Interdisciplinary

This is an example of using ENV model in the 4th grade for giving them a tool to find out the group working skills which needed developing.

This is kind of like asking the students to develop a rubric to mark their own group work skills - they work out the parameters (variables) and values themselves. The group working skills needed to be identified and named in order to see where there was scope for development.

The process had started from the values (V). The comments of the children during the group working process were taken down and here are some examples

"I don’t want to do this."
"I want red card."

"Come here and work with us."

"Could you help me." (link)

The children were given a list of comments they had come out with while working together. They were asked to write down what the person did while saying a comment. They had to form a sentence telling what the person is doing starting with He/she is… (link). I had a vision that we needed to approach the skills from the real life action which took place in the class.

The sentences were looked at and now the thinking model ENV was introduced to organize the information from the sentences. E stood for the group working skills. How could we transform the action (written in sentences) into group working skills? The pupils had to write a list of skills (N) that were based on the actions (verbs) in the sentences. Every comment had several sentences. The pupils were forming one parameter per a group of sentences. They had to give a name to each group of sentences. They needed to see what was common between the actions in the sentences. They were forming N of the ENV model. (link)

Now there was a list of skills which could be used for marking and reflection. What is the skill I need to develop? What is my aim when I’m doing group working next time. The whole group could also choose an aim from the list. The group working skills had been made visible by using the ENV-model.