Curiosity Skill: Encouraging Students to Ask Other Students If you want to make a massive change in the culture of your classroom, move from teachers asking students all of the questions to students asking each other questions!
Get Students Out Of Creative Ruts Sometimes students need a little structure to force them into a more creative state of mind. Here are a few ideas for interesting writing prompts
Divergent Questions (How To Ask ‘Em) How to ask Divergent Questions and ensure that your students are thinking rather than merely remembering.
No Street Names In Japan? Do your learners use the tool 👓 multiple perspectives to analyze stories, problems, and historical events? Here's a TED Talk about real-life multiple perspectives that will make your students (and you!) reconsider basic assumptions.
From Silent Reading To Creating Art I've been continuing the idea to explore classic music during silent reaing, and incorporated Gustav Holsts' "The Planets." My students, who have an affinity for memorizing gods and goddesses, took a special interest in this idea. I figured, let's see how far their interests will take us?
Don’t Jump Straight to “Create”! When we jump from "this kid likes board games" straight to "I'll have them create a new board game", we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here's how to scaffold a truly creative task.
Tickling Curiosity Let's look at a way to encourage and scaffold curiosity in our classes using a "Book of Unanswered Questions." Begin by sharing intriguing objects or images and asking your own questions. Give kids a chance to find answers to their questions. Then encourage students to bring in their own intriguing conversation starters. Finally, move students towards curriculum based questions.
Upgrading Questions with Key Words How adding a single "key word" can upgrade your questions to a whole new level.
Synthesize: Make A Change, Explain The Effect I love the term "Synthesize" from the classic Bloom's Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite "Synthesize Recipe" is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.
Evaluate with Academic Tournaments The bracketed tournament isn't just for college basketball. Set up a tournament to determine best president, state, element, or literary character and challenge your students to make interesting judgements.
