This week I have had a sudden and quite uncomfortable realisation. I haven't opened up my classroom at all, I have simply changed the person delivering at the front.
I am going to run the first part of one of Dan Meyers 3 act lessons ( http://threeacts.mrmeyer.com/pennycircle/ ).
Pupils will initialy only view the first clip. They will then, in groups, discuss what questions they might ask, writing the best of them in large print on A3 paper. These will get 'posted' on our classroom walls. As a class we will discuss the questions, see if any more arise (or that some get discarded). Groups will then decide for themselves which questions they will investigate.
Answers (or new questions) will be stuck (posted) under the exisiting ones. Groups will be free to move from question to question, to develop other groups answers and to find completely new things to do on their own.
Pupils will then be asked to bring in their own clips/ pictures that they think raise interesting maths questions. At this point we will move from our classroom walls to a Wiki, from paper posts to virtual post and from discussing questions and ideas on our own to joining up with other classrooms in other schools. Pupils will choose their own questions to investigate. Produce answers to be reviewed by a real audience, review their peers work and that produced by other schools. They will be able to compare their work to that produced by younger and older students, to see the 'development' of thinking around an idea.
The core clips/ pictures can be accessed at any level - what changes is the level of maths used to ask and answer questions.