Back to school....consider asking these questions

How many of you ask your students, "What did you do this summer?"    If you do, read on and consider these questions instead of the age old question of what they did this summer.

Jenny Froehle, in her blog suggests that in this tech age when we are tasked with growing students as problem solvers and critical thinkers we should rethink the questions we ask students.  She suggests the following questions and a few different ways to ask them.

Keep in mind that these questions are not geared to one specific grade band so, the language or the way they are asked may need to be modified for your age group.

I agree with Jenny when she talks about the need to help students:

• identify and quickly understand a need or problem,
• creatively design solutions,
• analyze what it takes to build answers,
• collaborate with others,
• communicate findings and results,
• critique and revise without fear, 
• know where to go to learn what they need to solve a problem or complete a project,
• etc....

These questions push us to help kids start "digging deeper" and actually apply and transfer their knowledge in real world kinds of ways.  

When I read Jenny's blog post I was really struck by how we can take simple "back to school" questions and make them so much more in-depth teaching questions.  I can't take credit for most of this, I just summarized and reformatted much of what she shared.

As our teacher's getting ready to go back to school TOMORROW...I couldn't help but share these thing.  I want to wish all of our WCPS teachers (you know who you are) a wonderful start to the 2015-16 school year!