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The Great Question Press Why should teachers nurture potent questioning skills and behaviors? As a practical matter, students need to be able to read between the lines, infer meaning, draw conclusions from disparate clues and avoid the traps of presumptive intelligence, bias and predisposition. They need these thinking skills to score well on increasingly tough school tests, but more importantly, they need these skills to score well on the increasingly baffling tests of life . . . how to vote? Drill and practice combined with highly scripted lessons stressing patterns and prescriptions amount to mental robbery - setting low standards for disadvantaged students so they end up incapable of thought or success on demanding tests. This approach contributes to high dropout and attrition rates - early school departures and millions of children left behind.
How Dissecting a Pencil Can Ignite Curiosity and Wonderment | MindShift | KQED News Can the act of making or designing something help kids feel like they have agency over the objects and systems in their lives? That’s the main question a group of researchers at Project Zero, a research group out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, are tackling alongside classroom-based teachers in Oakland, California. In an evolving process, researchers are testing out activities they’ve designed to help students to look more closely, explain more deeply and take on opportunities to change things they see around them. The program is called Agency By Design and it relies on nimble, malleable activities Project Zero researchers call “thinking routines” that slow down the pace of the classroom to make space for deep observation and wonderment. That happens by talking and discussing objects or systems in the everyday world to help kids develop words to describe their thinking. One big emphasis in the project so far has been on looking deeply at even the simplest of objects.
Enter into the Research A MiddleWeb Blog “Do you always do this research project?” she asked, as class was ending. All around her, classmates were putting away laptop computers. “I really like it,” she added. “Some years, we do political essays,” I responded. Then, as a typical sixth grader, she said it anyway. I wish every conversation with my sixth grade students about classroom research projects were this positive. A memory that gives me shivers Kevin, behind his 6th grade teacher I still remember a monumental, and nearly insurmountable, research project that I was assigned in elementary school on an African country. I don’t even remember the country I researched nor do I recall what I discovered in my inquiry. Lehman reminds us that small scale research endeavors are more effective than huge research projects that overwhelm students. I’ve taken this advice to heart. Creating more opportunities for student choice This year, I found great success with my students’ ability to generate a topic of interest:
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 ---
Questioning Techniques: Research-Based Strategies for Teachers — Energy and the Polar Environment Questioning techniques are a heavily used, and thus widely researched, teaching strategy. Research indicates that asking questions is second only to lecturing. Teachers typically spend anywhere from 35 to 50 percent of their instructional time asking questions. But are these questions effective in raising student achievement? How can teachers ask better questions of their students? Teachers ask questions for a variety of purposes, including: To actively involve students in the lessonTo increase motivation or interestTo evaluate students’ preparationTo check on completion of workTo develop critical thinking skillsTo review previous lessonsTo nurture insightsTo assess achievement or mastery of goals and objectivesTo stimulate independent learning A teacher may vary his or her purpose in asking questions during a single lesson, or a single question may have more than one purpose. Some researchers have simplified classification of questions into lower and higher cognitive questions.
Vulnerability = Online Teacher Leadership This is part of Crystal Morey’s Getting Better Together work. Crystal and all the Teaching Channel Laureates are going public with their practice and seeking support in getting better from colleagues and the Tch community. After finishing the 11-week book study Making Number Talks Matter in late December, I began reflecting on the experience of helping to co-construct and co-facilitate #MNTMTch. My “normal” teaching day has seven periods with roughly 135 students. As fellow Teaching Channel Laureate Kristin Gray and I planned the book study, I was nervous to go public with my practice via social media, which was one of the channels we’d use for interacting with participants. Second, since I don’t get into other teachers’ classrooms very often to watch them teach, I had doubts that my instructional suggestions would be appropriate for a particular teacher. Finally, I’ve been a private person online, and was protective and afraid to show my insecurities. My nerves were starting to ease.
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. Choose the Main ConceptThe first step to writing essential questions is to write down the main concept that you are trying to teach your students. Although this may seem obvious at first, many teachers find that once they write down what they are trying to teach, they realize that they should really be focusing on something entirely different. Writing Lessons and Mini Lessons The mini lesson is an often overlooked tool that teachers can use to teach basic writing skills.
The Poisonous Mythology of Grittiness Posted by Bill Ferriter on Wednesday, 01/13/2016 Yesterday, I had the chance to do some brainstorming about Design Thinking with John Spencer -- a thinker and a friend that I greatly admire. During the course of the conversation, I asked John why he thought that Design Thinking should play a role in modern classrooms. His answer was a huge a-ha moment for me: "Design thinking builds grit by giving a lot of slack. Stew in that for a minute, would you? I'm not sure if that definition is a result of our compulsive obsession with bootstraps, our one-time belief that hard work is the Golden Ticket to Heaven, or the fact that we've been told time and again that instruction in our schools isn't all that 'rigorous', but defining grit as a willingness to struggle through miserable experiences is a poisonous myth that harms students because it suggests that learning has to be painful in order to be meaningful. #sheeshchat What if we believed that ALL learning should be fundamentally joyful?
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. In revisiting them recently, I noticed that quite a few of them were closed/yes or no questions, so I went back and revised some of them, and added a few new ones, something I’ll try to do from time to time. 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 Creation
Data on teacher prep grads will soon lead to consequences for some programs Eleven states now tie teacher outcomes back to their preparation programs, and an increasing number of states are planning to use that data to decide whether to keep programs open, according to a new report by Bellwether Education Partners. The report comes as many teacher preparation programs and experts are waiting on the U.S. Department of Education to finalize new federal regulations that could require all states to determine how graduates fare after completing teacher preparation programs and report that data publicly. Related: California faces a dire teacher shortage. Should other states worry too? The 11 states that currently track this data look at a variety of graduate information, including the academic growth of students taught by graduates (as measured by standardized tests), job placement rate of graduates, and the persistence rate once teachers begin teaching. Six states plan to use this data in the future to make “consequential decisions” about programs.