• I’ve just read David Warlick’s blog post on Transformative Questions and am feeling pretty excited about it. In it he challenges teachers to “create a culture of learners that thrive in the 21st century.” He says that learning should include the following qualities. They should :
– be responsive to learners’ needs
– provoke conversation,
– inspire personal investment
– be guided by safely-made mistakes.

 

He has come up with these questions to challenge us when designing lessons:

1. How might I alter this assignment or project so that it “Responds” to the learner? How can the experience “Talk Back?”
2. How might I plant barriers within the assignment that force learners to “Question” their way through — to value the “questions” not just for “answers?”
3. How can I ban silence in my classroom, provoking “Conversation” with my assignments and projects, expecting learners to exchange ideas and knowledge?
4. How can I make their learning worth “Investing” in? How might the outcomes of their learning be of value to themselves and to others?
5. How am I daring my students to make the “Mistakes” that feed the learning dialog?

By @reflectivemaths

I love these questions and am going to pin them up somewhere where I will look at them because I think they need looking at. Every day.

Here are my responses:

1. Creating a dialogic classroom is a key tenet of formative assessment – without this kind of back & forth between teachers and learners, any progress made is despite rather than because of what the teacher is doing.
2. It is vital that students can value the process of learning rather than merely focussing on the end product. I’m not just teaching them to pass exams; I am, hopefully, encouraging them to think and learn.
3. All classrooms should be organised to encourage collaborative learning. This is how students learn best. If you’re not doing this, why not? The most common answer is fear of bad behaviour.
4. All learning should relate to the real world and be of some practical value. Students need to know that learning is a lifelong process.
5. Without mistakes, there is no learning. If we don’t have the confidence can’t risk failure we can never ‘make a dent in the universe’ and are dooming ourselves to mediocrity.

I can think of at least one more important question which I think needs adding to the list:

6. How am I challenging my students to work hard and not take the easiest route to completing a task. How am I encouraging students to value effort and not to believe that ‘smart’ people don’t have to work at it.

Any ideas for other questions to help create a culture of learners?