Fostering Student Questions: Strategies for Inquiry-Based Learning 1. The Question Formulation Technique The Question Formulation Technique offers a starting place to teach students how to construct questions that meet their needs. The QFT is a process for coaching students on the value and pitfalls of closed-ended and open-ended questions, including where and how to use them. 2. One challenge to generating substantive questions and ideas is getting every student's voice heard. Post a topic as a statement starter or a question on chart paper for small groups. Traditionally, the teacher collects the results at the end to use as data for later activities based on the students' contributions. 3. One challenge with reading articles or other pieces of writing is getting students to read for meaning and make connections beyond summary. Divide students into groups of 2-4. This process encourages students to express themselves and explore their ideas with a group. 4. It's amazing what students come up with when the teacher is silent. No Time to Wait
Useful Tips on Writing Essential Questions written by: Keren Perles • edited by: Wendy Finn • updated: 9/11/2012 Essential questions can make the lesson planning process more effective, but many teachers struggle to write quality essential questions for their lessons. Read on for a step-by-step guide to writing essential questions. 1. Writing Lessons and Mini Lessons The mini lesson is an often overlooked tool that teachers can use to teach basic writing skills. The Questioning Toolkit - Revised The first version of the Questioning Toolkit was published in November of 1997. Since then there has been substantial revision of its major question types and how they may function as an interwoven system. This article takes the model quite a few steps further, explaining more about each type of question and how it might support the overall investigative process in combination with the other types. photo ©istockphoto.com Section One - Orchestration Most complicated issues and challenges require the researcher to apply quite a few different types of questions when building an answer. Orchestration is the key concept added to the model since its first version. orchestrate: To combine and adapt in order to attain a particular effect: arrange, blend, coordinate, harmonize, integrate, synthesize, unify. As the researcher moves beyond mere gathering to discovering and inventing new meanings, the complexity and the challenge of effective orchestration grows dramatically. --- Essential Questions ---
Reflecting on reflection This is hardly wasting time. It is this kind of sitting that allows the mind to wander, to wonder and to speculate. Sven Birkert calls this process "resonance" in The Gutenberg Elegies: Resonance—there is no wisdom without it. Resonance is a natural phenomenon, the shadow of import alongside the body of fact, and it cannot flourish except in deep time. Incubation We are looking for something. Making our way toward inspiration and illumination - the "Aha!" This incubation process usually thrives on reverie and musing - mood states within which the subconscious works its best magic. Reverie Reverie is the dream state during which incubation, percolation and fermentation may take place. daydream, daydreaming, trance, musing; inattention, inattentiveness, woolgathering, preoccupation, absorption, abstraction, lack of concentration Reflecting on a Painting, a Poem, a Photograph or an Essay Here are some examples that require such thought: What will it mean to be "well read" in the next decade?
How to Bring ‘More Beautiful’ Questions Back to School In the age of information, factual answers are easy to find. Want to know who signed the Declaration of Independence? Google it. Curious about the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel, “The Scarlet Letter”? Curiosity is baked into the human experience. “Kids are lighting up their pleasure zones and getting dopamine hits every time they learn something that solves something they were curious about,” Berger said. Luckily, kids are hard-wired for that kind of generative curiosity. There are a lot of understandable reasons why questioning drops off in school. But knowledge can also be the enemy of questioning. And of course there are social barriers to questioning. These barriers to questioning are real and challenging, but there are lots of ways parents and teachers can work to make questioning a normal part of school and life. “You don’t have to have the answers. “We want their questions to be large and expanded instead of being diminished and eventually going away,” Berger said.
7 Ways to Inspire Divergent Thinking in the Classroom The world is unpredictable. The corporate ladder is now a maze, which means our students will need to think divergently. In this article, we explore how to integrate divergent thinking into our everyday classroom practices. If you enjoy this blog but you’d like to listen to it on the go, just click on the audio below or subscribe via iTunes/Apple Podcasts (ideal for iOS users) or Google Play and Stitcher (ideal for Android users). When I was a kid, my twin brother and I loved watching American Gladiators. You remember, Lace, Zap, Blaze, Ice, and all the other characters whose names either sounded like street drugs or onomatopoeia. It was epic. We spent hours playing our game, adding slight variations on it and eventually hacking the rules to make it less and less like American Gladiators and more and more like The Spencer Twin Gladiators. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, something powerful was happening when we invented our American Gladiators game. Success! Success!
Many, Many Examples Of Essential Questions by Terry Heick Essential questions are, as Grant Wiggins defined, ‘essential’ in the sense of signaling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries.” These are grapple-worthy, substantive questions that not only require wrestling with, but are worth wrestling with–that could lead students to some critical insight in a 40/40/40-rule sense of the term. I collected the following set of questions through the course of creating units of study, most of them from the Greece Central School District in New York. Or maybe I’ll make a separate page for them entirely. See also 8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions Many, Many Examples Of Essential Questions Decisions, Actions, and Consequences What is the relationship between decisions and consequences? Social Justice What is social justice? Culture: Values, Beliefs & Rituals How do individuals develop values and beliefs? Adversity, Conflict, and Change How does conflict lead to change? Utopia and Dystopia Chaos and Order Creation Sources
Why Understanding These Four Types of Mistakes Can Help Us Learn by Eduardo Briceño This article was first published in the Mindset Works newsletter. We can deepen our own and our students’ understanding of mistakes, which are not all created equal, and are not always desirable. After all, our ability to manage and learn from mistakes is not fixed. We can improve it. Here are two quotes about mistakes that I like and use, but that can also lead to confusion if we don’t further clarify what we mean: “A life spent making mistakes is not only most honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing” – George Bernard Shaw “It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose which it truly has.” – Maria Montessori These constructive quotes communicate that mistakes are desirable, which is a positive message and part of what we want students to learn. Types of mistakes The stretch mistakes Stretch mistakes happen when we’re working to expand our current abilities.
Information Literacy for Littlies | 500 Hats From the time they are born children are innately curious and as soon as they are able to articulate the words, they ask questions so they can make the connections they need as they try to make sense of their world. As the nearest adult we try to help them with the answers. When the child comes to school they know they are going to learn to read not only so they can enjoy stories for themselves but also so they can answer their own questions. So how can we help them do this right from the get-go? How can we help them ask quality questionsfind appropriate resourcesidentify their purposeuse clues and cues to choose the information they needsort their informationshare their learningassess their workact on what they’ve learned to seek, evaluate, create and use information effectively to achieve their personal,. social, occupational and educational goals (Beacons of the Information Society: The Alexandria Proclamation on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning)