Short term pain – Long term gain?

This week has been a difficult one in many ways for teaching unGooglable questions, but there are also plenty of indications of success to keep me thinking positive towards the end of term. Trying something new is a risk, it takes your teaching time, and eats into your curriculum, and often the end result is not ensured. In the end this week, it was one question on a post it note that tells me we’re getting somewhere.

Firstly, lets look at the difficulties:

Number one: I’m asking kids to work in an entirely new way, which is more difficult, has a less apparent purpose and is taking up a whole lot more time than usual. By now, most of the students want to do a diorama or a papier-mache sphinx with labels on it and get it over with. These kids are nearly teenagers, by the way, so they know how to express these doubts in just the right way…

Number two: I’m doing so much more ‘support’ teaching and more detailed pre-planing that I even catch myself looking wistfully back at the last project, so full of self directed time, well understood expectations and support for only the true strugglers in the room. Because what I’ve essentially done this week is to make almost everyone into a struggler, even myself, and the attendant increase on my attentions is creating not only frustration for the class, but actual queues. And all of this is fine, because in my head I know where I’m going with this and I’m pretty sure the end result will be better, but I’m also having to do a fair bit of PR to keep the students on board. I’m also out of my own comfort zone which is good, but also time consuming.

Number three: I’m learning as I go. I’ve already started to create a fairly long list of modifications to the way I might teach this process in the future. I’m relearning that the level of general knowledge needed to create great high order questions needs to be instilled first, and having to play catch up on this has not made things easier.

Overall, I’m really happy with the questions that have resulted, but some of them are the kind of questions where you just know that you’ll be working on them for a long time to come.

Now let’s look at the positives.

Here are some examples of the kinds of questions my students came up with about Egypt this week:

  • How do we know the artefacts are real and not fakes?
  • How did the burial rituals shape the everyday life of Egyptians?
  • What would you change about the way slaves lived?
  • Would modern day Egypt be famous today (for tourists) without the Pyramids?
  • Compare the purpose and construction of the Pyramids and the World Trade Centre?
  • What would have happened to Egypt without trade?
  • Compare the difference between the historical evidence for Ancient Egypt and Aboriginal Australia.

These are just the questions that stick in my mind tonight, but there were many more, just as complex and with just as many layers needed to get to the bottom of them.

This of course leads to the most uncomfortable question of all for this particular educator. How do I go about teaching kids to answer them?

I spent a lot of time this week playing catch up on content. A few discovery channel videos, some texts, and even a trip to the Museum worked as solid background information. Throughout this I kept my pockets full of pencils and post-it notes and encouraged kids to scribble questions down at every opportunity. We would return at the end of lessons and try to place the questions on the question wall, using Blooms to rank the ‘Googlability’ of each. We quickly built up a huge repository of difficult, high order questions.

And because there were some students who delivered many questions and some who delivered a few, and in service to the idea that it was the process rather than the question which mattered, I decided to pull the questions out of a hat.  There was some ‘debate’ about this, as you can imagine. Some students asked to do one of their own questions on grounds of personal interest, and others didn’t care what question they got.  I allowed some students to pick their own, and the rest of the class took pot luck.

I also spent the week introducing a range of mind maps, noting scaffolds, and alternative ways for students to break their complex question down into more manageable, or directed secondary questions. There were two reasons for introducing a wide range of materials. Firstly, not every student works the same, so a range of options helps them choose their most effective method, and secondly, I was unsure myself which of these methods was best. (see ‘learning as you go.’) The idea was that students would use the time to break their question down until they had an appropriate list of Googlable questions that would inform their decisions about how they would answer their main question.

This took, and continues to take, some explaining…

But one of the most important things to combat this week was the student’s feeling that they should be ‘getting on’ with it. So many of them still feel that this section of the Egypt project is unimportant or time wasting. It’s one of the hardest perceptions to combat so far, and probably one of the most important.

One of the ways I’ve done this is to restrict this week and next into ‘research and planning weeks’, time spent purely nutting out the best secondary questions to ask, and deciding where the answers fit in the bigger question. Students are not allowed to begin actually research until the coming week, and they cannot start to draft until after the holidays. I’m really aware that if students slip through this next phase with weak plans or bad questions, they’ll really struggle. At the same time, spending the extra time should create better results and better information reports. That’s the idea anyway.

I’ve also found that the process involves a lot of back and forward, and kids (as well as teachers) will need to adapt to that. The point of generating a really hard question by making it ungooglable, followed by a process of breaking it down into lots of little questions that are googleable, followed by a process of incorporating all those answers back into a coherent response to the original question is one that students will doubtless be frustrated by. I’m sure hoping that the end result of a truly investigative report, as well as the idea that the process they just used can be transferred to any topic, will be enough of a reward for them.

And, hopefully, enough of a reward for me as well, seeing as I’m gambling so much learning time on it.

The Highlight of the week, however, comes from the question posed by one of my students at the museum, the kind of question that had me scrambling for post it note and pen. It was the kind of question that set me off on designing a whole new side project, designed purely because someone asked this question of me.

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For me this question was my reward for the week. This student was no longer thinking about how you mummify someone or how many cats you were allowed to take into a tomb with you, someone was applying knowledge of ancient Egypt to the modern world.

She was nowhere near as impressed with the news that her excellent question was the basis of a whole new task we will start next term. Neither were her classmates, as it happened, but it sure was the signal I needed to see that some students were starting to get it, and to keep me moving forward.

5 thoughts on “Short term pain – Long term gain?

  1. I suppose it is important for your students to also know that well qualified people are probably pursuing answers to some of their questions as their life’s work, so it is OK for them to not necessarily be able to completely answer them. It will help them to realise that whole fields of science and history are entirely built on the pursuit of questions just like theirs.

  2. LOVE your blog posts on this topic. Believe it or not, I am attempting the same process with elementary gifted students. I look forward to following your journey as I undertake my own – so much of what you have to say (as well as those who post comments) is both helpful and reassuring – thank you!

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