Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Summertime Questioning Mashup

A-ha moments are always special....this particular one was all the more interesting to as it was a twitter-ha moment.

The flipped classroom has received so much press recently that it feels a bit like it has jumped the shark.    The reality is that students, in the near term, will still be spending blocks of time with individual teachers.  The conventional wisdom is that engagement must be technology fueled (BYOD gone wild).    On a more basic level, engagement can be derived simply by rethinking the traditional teacher-student hierarchical arrangement and re-purposing the use of questions in the classroom.

Questioning has moved from an open-ended, exploratory exercise to a hollow, stale, single right answer call and response paradigm.  Wouldn't students be more engaged if we returned to an earlier form of questioning and discussion, where there were no canned, prescribed answers and curiosity ruled the day?

Teach to the test zealots will already be poo-pooing this notion, but I content that students will naturally perform better on standardized tests if they spend the other 179 days in the school year authentically engaged with content, rather than preparing exclusively for a singular experience.

So, here's the mashup part - links to two different blog posts that tackle the pedagogy and imperative of authentic questioning and classroom discussion (here's a hint, if the teacher is at the center of this web the activity is not hitting the mark).

The first comes from William Sprankles, 6-12 Principal with the Princeton City School District (This is the imperative part)

http://leadership247.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/redefining-what-educators-must-be/

See his fourth point - Be a Philosopher and Live In The Question:


The second come from Ben Johnson writing on the Edutopia website (This is the pedagogical part).


http://www.edutopia.org/blog/improving-teacher-questions-ben-johnson


Enjoy this twitter-ha mashup moment!