50 Questions To Help Students Think About What They Think - TeachThought
contributed by Lisa Chesser Using the right questions creates powerful, sometimes multiple answers and discussions. Aristotle said that he asked questions in response to other people’s views, while Socrates focused on disciplined questioning to get to the truth of the matter. Ultimately questions spark imagination, conjure emotions, and create more questions. The questions asked by a teacher or professor are sometimes more glaringly valuable than the information transferred to the students. Those questions spark a thought, which leads to a fiercely independent search for information.
A Brilliant Question
Not Essential There is a difference between essential questions and brilliant questions. While essential questions touch upon the most important issues of life, they are rarely brilliant. Essential questions touch our hearts and souls. They are central to our lives. They help to define what it means to be human.
Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions
This process explicitly validates all students’ intellectual abilities.– High School History Teacher, New York The reasons behind their questions often bowl me over with their sincerity, the fact that [they] really want to know the answers because it’s important to them, or they feel it would be important for others to know.– 4th Grade Teacher, Chicago The ability to produce questions, improve questions and prioritize questions may be one of the most important—yet too often overlooked—skills that a student can acquire in their formal education. Strong critical thinking is often grounded in the questions we ask. By deliberately teaching questioning skills, we will be facilitating a process that will help students develop a mental muscle necessary for deeper learning, creativity and innovation, analysis, and problem solving.
The Ethics Centre - Ethics Explainer: Tolerance
The yes result of the same-sex marriage survey is in. Now parliament is dealing with the minefield of tolerance: how will it change legislation so it honours family diversity and religious freedoms without discriminating against either? What should be tolerated, accepted and prohibited?
Design Thinking – The New Innovation Strategy – Leader In U
Today we are living and doing business in complex modern technology driven environment. There are various types of complexities, in different forms and faces, and in this volatile environment, business need to experiment with different approaches to thrive. They not only need to understand the complex technologies but also make sense to start using the same for their benefit. We are seeing a massive transformation across the business world – where they are applying the principles of design to the way people work. They are investing in design to get to the top of the trend to deliver more value to their customers.
Compelling Questions and Stultifying Questions
Some questions are more powerful, more important and more engaging than others. Some are quite boring. They will cause students to "lose enthusiasm and initiative, especially as a result of a tedious or restrictive routine." (Quoting from the Apple Dictionary's definition of "stultify.") The failure to know the difference between compelling and stultifying can undermine the success of even the most ambitious and well intended reform effort.
‘Critical’ Information Literacy
The capacity for local conditions and issues to influence the way information literacy is defined and taught, is a concept that has gained significant momentum over the last decade among librarians and educators around the world. This growing realisation has resulted in an increasing body of research produced at the intersection of critical pedagogy and information literacy. From this research, the concept of ‘Critical Information Literacy’ has emerged. Jacobs and Berg (2011) explain: “In its focus on engaging with questions about information, critical information literacy is an attempt to help students see that information questions are deeply embedded within cultural, social, political, and economic contexts”.
An Exercise in Design Thinking:
Step 1: Discovery Browsing the “printable backpacking checklist” search results, I ran into two common themes: They’re either all super rigid, bloated and overly exhaustive, or they’re not actually printable. For example, many are weighed down with various bright colors/artwork (increased ink usage) or they’re not formatted to print in any sort of logical/economical way. The top Google result features a tiny text link to a downloadable PDF, but you’d have to adhere to one person’s specific packing ideology, i.e. a somehow vague, yet specific “2/2.5 lbs of food per day”.
