Thoughts on teaching & educational technology

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it must be worth at least a few good questions — probably more, if students have been taught how to frame good questions. I use Levels of Questions, and the categorization of questions into L1, L2, and L3, as a common vocabulary to help students develop basic inquiry skills. I believe the easiest first foray into the land of inquiry is through a compelling image, like this one:

I’d project this on my screen (or you could display it on an overhead — it’s available from the Nat’l Archives.

Anyway, I’d start my class with that picture, and these instructions: “write as many relevant L1 and L2 questions as you can about this picture. Write questions that, if answered, will help you fully understand what is going on inside the frame of the picture — not outside of it, not related to or implied by it, but just inside the frame itself.”

I might give the students, early in the year, 5-7 minutes to write questions, after which we’d go over them as a class.

Going over their questions helps reinforce well-written questions, and helps the students recognize what sorts of questions are genuinely helpful in ‘unlocking’ a topic — that is, really helping them to learn about it.

Anyway, once the questions are written, the students need resources to dig through for answers. Empire High School subscribes to several of ABC-CLIO’s excellent social studies databases, and using them I can create customized ‘Research Lists’ of resources — pictures, quotes, biographies, essays, primary source documents, and more — for the students to use as springboards to learn about a given topic. As part of my lesson preparation I would have created a list of resources related to this image, or whatever image I was using for that lesson. I wouldn’t include anything too obvious — like an essay about women ordnance workers in WW2 — but I would populate the list with things like statistics about the demographics of the American labor force during WW2, a few biographies of major personalities from the time & topics, pictures of some of the many morale-boosting posters of the time, and other resources that would enable the students to answer the questions they had framed.

Then I set them loose for a given period of time, in class or out, to use the list of materials I’ve provided (which helps me stay on track to meet my mandated standards) to answer as many of their own questions as possible, and to write additional ones (more on that step later).

The point, at this simple, early stage, is that students quickly become more interested in the topic presented because they are approaching it and meeting it from where they are — not from where I want them to be. I might have some junior history buff who’d recognize the model of plane that those nose assemblies go to, and he/she would write questions based on that prior knowledge. I might have a student who has no clue at all what those things are — and he/she could frame questions that would be immediately useful in figuring out those critical basics — the key questions — that must be answered before any additional, deeper consideration can take place.

So it’s simple at the outset: students write their own questions, then go about answering them using teacher-selected resources that are topically-focused. More on what I do with all this in my next post.

jdg