As teachers, it is fun to dream about nurturing the next creative inventor or scientist—perhaps someone who will help us harness pollution to make energy or feed those in areas where drought devastates crops. Or maybe we imagine one of our students thanking us in a Tony award speech, or seeing her writing on a … Continue reading
One of my favorite tools for helping students move from absorbers to questioners comes from Deborah Meier. She cites five Habits of Mind underlying Boston’s Mission Hill School, each of which can be framed as a question. Here, from Meier’s 2009 article “Democracy at Risk” are the five questions that she believes can define a … Continue reading
One of the books that has helped pushed questioning to the front-and-center of the education agenda is Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question. A More Beautiful Question is not a book about education specifically, but a book about the way raising questions changes human learning, interaction, and invention. This is a book focused on innovation, … Continue reading
Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana’s book, Make Just One Change, suggests the one strategy that will transform education is teaching students to ask their own questions. Interestingly, their journey to this conclusion began, not with students, but with parents. Working with parents in a dropout prevention program in the 1980s, the authors repeatedly heard from … Continue reading
Questions. We ask them when we need directions. We ask them when we don’t understand. Sometimes we ask questions in outrage, other times we ask them in curiosity and wonder. Sometimes questions are rhetorical, other times they are urgent. If we want to help students be questioners, we need to help them understand the types … Continue reading
Last week I wrote about McTighe and Wiggins’ Essential Questions: Opening the Doors to Student Understanding as a resource for developing creativity as well as learning for understanding. Today I’d like to consider the ways the same processes contribute to developing a creativity-friendly classroom. Questions can transform the class world! Recently, Wiggins posted an excerpt … Continue reading
I recently read Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins’ Essential Questions: Opening the Doors to Student Understanding, and thought, “How wonderful to have a book so totally supportive of creativity, while focusing all the while on understanding.” The Creativity in the Classroom Model links creativity, learning for understanding, and motivation for learning. This book provides a … Continue reading
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