AUSSIE

Blog entry posted December 7th, 2009 by Dale Worsley

Last blog post, I settled on the piñata as a metaphor for how big ideas work in the classroom. You whack it hard enough, and out bursts a hailstorm of essential and guiding questions.

Essential questions are the crown jewels of the curriculum. They dazzle us with their value and beauty at the front of the classroom, posted above blackboards (or whiteboards, or smartboards.) They are a constant point of reference during the year’s, the unit’s, the week’s, the day’s lessons. They inspire and intrigue: What is civilization and why did it come to exist? What are poetic traditions, and how can we find our place in them? What is energy, where does it come from, and how does it sustain life? Was mathematics created or discovered? What is beauty? Why are some sounds music and others noise? These are a few that have made and will always make me ravenous to learn more. Every class can have essential questions that inspire.

And guiding questions, those Vergils that take us along on our tour of the facts and help us discover our skills. They deserve respect too, enough to appear on project sheets, in do-nows, in the middle boxes of discussion web graphic organizers, as directed freewriting prompts, you name it. I have no less love for the guiding question than I do for the essential question.

But essential and guiding questions aren’t the only ones that belong in the joyous classroom I dream of night and day.

I need to change my big idea metaphor here.

A big idea is more an atom than a piñata. Whirl it around the cyclotron of our lesson planner fast enough, smash it hard enough, and a whole universe of quarkish, neutrinoish, Higgs bosonish questions spew forth to entertain, excite and inform us: leading questions that get straight to the facts, ma’am, just the facts; questions glide that up and down the scale of Bloom’s taxonomy like Glenn Gould’s fingers on a piano keyboard; the Right There, Think and Search, Author and You,  and On My Own questions that come with the Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) strategy; the questions that give structure to the Structured Note Taking strategy; the questions students generate in Reciprocal Teaching…. And we’re just getting warmed up!

Today, though, I’d like to stop and appreciate, for a moment, some specific questions that came up in a 2nd grade classroom last week in the context of the What I Know; Want to Learn; Learned (KWL) strategy. The little folks in Tom McMurrer’s class at PS 124 were being introduced to their letter-writing unit. Tom asked them what they already knew about letters. They knew a lot. You have the date. You have the salutation. You have the ending. There is the envelope. And on the envelope is the address. It was in the Want to Learn part that trouble came up for the lesson plan, when kids didn’t ask about the form and content of letters, but, instead, were eager to know, “Where do you get a stamp?” “Why do you have to push the letter into the mailbox and make sure it falls?” “What happens to the letters after they go in the mailbox?” and “What is my address?”

“What is my address?” is easy. That fits right into the unit. And should. Every seven year old ought to know where they live.

But those other questions, they were dangerous. They could derail us from producing easy bulletin board samples into a whole Indiana Jones adventure about stamps, post offices and the art of pushing envelopes into those alligator-jawed mailboxes that like to bite our wrists when we feed them. As I sat watching Tom’s class, I started having visions of those wondrous post office trucks with the eagles on them (any way to get a ride in one?), the magic of a letter disappearing down one rabbit hole – the mailbox, and reappearing out of another – the mail slot at home, the one that gets the dog barking. I was fantasizing a research project, with class trips, and speakers – a monstrous mutant Gozilla that was oncologically growing, even as I thought of it, into The Question That Ate My Writing Unit….

Wait. Time out. I feel a tapping on my shoulder. Yes, it’s Gina the Blog Editor, reminding me my word count is going up again. Gotta go. Time for my electronic insulin shot. But next week I promise to get back to The Question that Ate My Writing Unit. And, for good measure, if I have room, a story about a Socratic seminar I facilitated in which one of the participants proposed we discuss the question, “How do I get rid of my wife?

Until then, keep asking questions, and enjoy.