First, let's all admire these pictures of Nick, Al, and Collin KILLIN' IT in Social Studies today!
Awwww yeahhhhh. That is some HIGH QUALITY thinking and learning going on!!!!
What these gentlemen are demonstrating is the second phase of the Question Building process, which we completed in class today. Now that you've had time to go through some or all of the evidence available to you, you spent some time in class reviewing the questions that arose while you worked. We are going to use these questions as Focus Questions for our reading. What is the point of Focus Questions? Well, I'm so glad you asked!
In class, I made the analogy that our brains function a lot like this Velcro wall here. The stuff you already know is the wall - it's covered with the information you've learned and remember from the past. The new learning, whether it's from a text or a video or painful experience, is the suit with the opposite side of the Velcro on it. Now, the more strips you have on your Velcro wall - the more you already know or have experienced about a topic - the more likely it is that the new learning (the kid in the Velcro suit) will "stick" and you'll understand it. The less you know, the less likely it is that the learning will stick, and/or the more work it's going to take for you to find a way to make that information stick.
The activity we've been doing, the Question-Building, is intended to help you build that Velcro wall BEFORE you read the textbook. I could have asked you, "Read the section in the text and tell me what caused the French and Indian War, and what effect it had on the colonies." Some of you probably could find some ideas in the book to repeat back to me, but for a lot of you, it would not have been a very effective assignment. Now that we've spent some time looking at pictures, reading maps, analyzing quotes, and so on, you've built a Velcro wall for your reading to stick to. The goal is for you to UNDERSTAND what we're reading and and learning and thinking about in class, not just go on an answer hunt for the "right" response and spit it back to me!
So today and tomorrow, you will be reviewing the questions you generated and reading the text to try to answer as many of those questions your group generated as possible. If you can't answer all of your questions, THAT'S GREAT - it means that you have more "loops" in your Velcro wall than you did before. Now, when you hear a snippet of information about the F&I War in the news, or a reference in a movie, or see a poster or walk by a museum exhibit, you may have that Aha! moment when you finally get an answer to your unanswered questions! Remember, learning is a messy, unpredictable, demanding, and sometimes frustrating business - but only if you're doing it correctly. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment