How long should we wait after asking a question? I might ask the best questions in the world, but if I don't give students even three seconds to think, those questions aren't doing their job. Here's what we know about Wait Time.
Focus on Thinking, Not the Product When I was a new teacher, you would have seen some pretty fancy products hanging in my room, but if you stopped to consider how my kids thought about the content... well, often my students just restated facts that I had already told them.
Combining Depth and Complexity Prompts into a Generalization Let's start with a puzzlement, ask kids to generate an abstract statement, and then find evidence that their statement works across several different areas.
Paradox: Ship of Theseus Here's a fun thought experiment your students are sure to get a kick out of: when something is slowly replaced over time, is it still the same thing in the end?
Sharpening Questions With some small changes, we can turn fluffy opinion questions into thought-provoking evaluation questions.
Make A *Better* Calendar! The calendar is a source of fantastic factoring problems with many social studies add-ons. Why 12 months? Why 30 (or 31 or 28) days? Why are weeks 7 days long? Why don't they fit into the months (or the year!)? Why did we do this to ourselves!?
Introducing Universal Themes and Generalizations Generalizations, big ideas, abstractions, universal themes... they are designed to help our gifted students learn. However, what I didn't realize was that they would help me teach!
What could we do with this Wax Museum event? How one might revamp a "Wax Museum" project into something that focuses more on thinking than product.
“Engagement” isn’t BAD, but… "Engagement" is a nice by-product of a well-designed lesson, but it sure isn't our actual goal as educators.
Four Types of Questions You Can Ask Asking questions is such a basic tool of teaching, yet how many of us have ever been taught to ask good questions? In this opening to a series about questioning, we'll explore how to get students asking each other questions.
