ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

picture: www.webstrategiesinc.com

I know that Connected educators month ended a few days ago. One of the things that I am probably most proud of was the creation of our 30 day blog challenge and the Facebook page created as part of that challenge. Yesterday the following post Inquire Within was posted on the page. The post got me thinking as many of the posts on the page do.

I think we are all aware of the need to create deep and meaningful learning experiences. These experiences are ones that must include innovative and creative ideas, critical thinking, inquiry learning and questioning.

There are many ways to invigorate these ideas into our daily lessons. The ways may be a subject of a future blog post.

However what is clear that we need to focus on the questions. Both the questions that we ask our students and the questions that we want to encourage our students to ask. Therefore we need to move away fro questions that lead to simple answers based on fact and move towards questions of WHY.

In writing this blog post there seemed to be a correlation between the types of questions we focused on and the different mindsets.  One who looks at the big picture and asks WHY would seem to have or at least be willing to develop a Growth Mindset while being limited to simple yes or no questions or basic fact questions would show that the person believes they are stuck or limited in their ability to grow and would suggest a fixed mindset.

Then I came across the following post on twitter today.
"Growth Mindset: Personal Accountability and Reflection"

The post talks about accountability and self reflection by students int order to foster or help them develop a Growth Mindset. The author provides a checklist of questions. The post is a worthy read but here is an excerpt from the post:

"In response to these experiences, I developed a Personal Accountability and Reflection series of questions.  I will suggest that students use this “checklist” in order to develop and enhance their growth mindsets through personal accountability and reflection.

• Did I work as hard as I could have?
• Did I set and maintain high standards for myself?
• Did I spend enough time to do quality work?
• Did I regulate my procrastination, distractions, and temptations in order to complete my work?
• Did I make good use of available resources?
• Did I ask questions if I needed help?
• Did I review and re-review my work for possible errors?
• Did I consider best practices for similar work?
• Is my work something for which I am proud – that I would proudly show to a large, global audience? "

What also struck me is the importance of asking the right questions.

Questions are the key not only to a depend more meaningful learning experience but to developing the proper mindset needed accomplish our learning goals.