Professional Learning for Busy Educators

Are there questions students can ask themselves while you’re teaching? Questions that can guide and support their own thinking and awareness before, during, and after your teaching?

Of course, this assumes you’re ‘teaching’ a traditional ‘lesson’ with a learning objective or target. If not, this may not be very helpful. This is also a list that, like many I’ve done, could get unnecessarily long fast. In some ways, this functions something like a KWL chart. The idea here, however, is less about brainstorming before or after a lesson, but rather having questions useful to guide the student so they can know what to expect.

A few tips to get started:

High school students ask this question partly to challenge the teacher’s authority, but they may really want to know the answer.

So I asked our writers to share some of their favorite conversation starters with their kids. These are especially great after a long school day when your babies don’t want to chat.

In a job search, you need to know what you are good at. Which can feel daunting at first if you have been taught not to brag about yourself, right?

Often the default is to talk about your degree or how many years you worked for a company. But that doesn’t tell people what you are good at.

"I talk about teaching and learning quite a lot. In fact, if you ask my wife, probably a little too much. Because of this, teachers in my department ask me questions about what I want them to be aiming for and what suggestions I have for the classes. Rather than spend too much time talking about pedagogy and teaching models, I try to keep it simple and look at the language the students are using in the classroom.

I could go into a lengthy discussion now about deep thinking and unGoogleable questions but let’s keep it more simple. Here are 5 questions I am aiming to never hear in my classroom ever again. If these questions are happening, then they point to some fairly simple issues that can be solved with a combination of resources, technology, and new pedagogical ideas centred on empowering the learners."

It just might be that in a society where information is abundant, thinking habits are more important than knowledge.

Somewhere beneath wisdom and above the ‘things’ a student knows. Laws of economics say that scarcity increases value. It’s no longer information that’s scarce, but rather meaningful response to that information. 

Thought.

And thought has a source–a complex set of processes, background knowledge, and schema that we can, as educators think of as cognitive habits. And if they’re habits, well, that means they’re probably something we can practice at, doesn’t it?