The class knew one right answer to one particular question. But they had no Learn idea whatsoever of the underlying concept, or of the context in which the question (or its answer) were relevant. The easy access to answers provided by the web and its powerful search engines, make it even easier for our students to fall into the trap of finding the answer quickly without having a clue of why the answer is important or why it was asked in the first place.
(In fact, a search on the teacher's question leads you to a 19th-century science-fiction book You Learn Math y Jules Verne, and to several esoteric research centers on earth science, none of which is directly relevant to the kinds of understandings called for in the national and state earth science standards. Though Verne is a master of the style and his books remain worth reading for their own sake, neither his novel nor the rest of the references take us in the right direction.)
Dewey's question is a better one. (For a good time, enter it verbatim into and see what you find.) It's better, not because it's easier to , but because, in a good instructional context, it is more likely to lead to fuller understanding. It's also more concrete; it's easier for a child's mind to picture; has no single right answer; it can lead in many (mostly relevant ) directions.
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But the last thing you'd want your students to do is to enter the question into and click the search button. Instead, you want them to imagine the context, to predict the results, to explore the possibilities, all before they open their computers or go online. A good question, in a good classroom context, leads in those directions.
Essential questions
A popular approach to curriculum development called Understanding by Design focuses on the key questions that should guide lesson planning. Advocates of UBD say that every lesson, every activity in the classroom, should first and foremost be led by an essential question, and that "the answers to these questions cannot be found, they must be invented." These kinds of questions seem to work well in a classroom with ubiquitous access to online information sources, where the answers to lower-order questions can be found quickly and almost without thinking. Good questions make students think, and make them use the online resources in a very different way.
In last week's article, fifth grade students misunderstood the topic the teacher assigned to them for their computer project. She told them to do a report on the Central Powers. They missed the context, as well as the closing s, and ended up finding lots of information on air-conditioning ( led them like a faithful retriever to the web site of the Central Power Cooperative). Had the teacher helped them form an essential question before they started their computer work, things might have gone better. A better question for this assignment might have been:
What did we call the two sides in World War I, and what were they fighting about?
Think of a topic you need to cover in the next few weeks. How might you design a good question to guide your student's online research, and to give some structure to their multimedia presentation? Here are some examples:
The latter questions are more interesting, more concrete, and more likely to promote good uses of online sources.
Beyond the question
It's not enough to pose one of these provocative questions, and then let the students loose on the Internet. A good teacher will outline a procedure for thinking about the question, and structuring the research process. The process might begin like this: