Thursday's Three Things—Measuring, Asking, Inviting
Three Things. On a Thursday.
Thursday’s Three Things looks a lot like the school year’s WDYN Wednesday—but it recognizes the pace of the summer months, taking a page from Ecocycle Planning. Not every source will be immediately applicable, and some might even trend towards general, philosophical considerations in the world of teaching and learning. But we’ve no doubt found them useful in some way, and as always, they’ve made us think. As legendary former Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein said, “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” Consider this our basket. What you choose to take is up to you.
We’ll continue this weekly series through mid-August, when we shift gears and ramp up for the start of the year. Onto this week's Thursday’s Three Things below!
Thursday’s Three Things
The Knowledge-Understanding Problem—There's been some conversation on social media recently about distinctions between performance and learning and just how murky these can be. 'Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn't Enough' author Christian Moore-Anderson weighed in last week with this blog post, suggesting that knowing (and understanding) are "interactions with the world." So too does he point out the importance of variation in instruction and the power of the "What If?" question.
It might seem like a minor distinction but when it comes to the assessment of learning, we'd do well to consider just what it is we're measuring and whether these measurements mirror the values we espouse.
Questions that Compound—Speaking of good questions, we've got questions on our mind this summer in the CTL. A portion of EA's forthcoming Portrait of a Graduate suggests that EA graduates "ask meaningful questions," which left us wondering how often do we promote and practice this skill in our classrooms? And because we are curious nerds at heart, we're building some PD around this exact question (see what we did there?).
Utilizing The Right Question Institute's ‘Question Formulation Technique,’ we're starting with the foundational idea of open versus closed questions, but extending this a bit to incorporate generative questions—the kinds of questions which lead to more questions—as a third, critical layer. We don't just want students asking better questions. We want them asking questions that extend the thinking of everyone inside, and outside, of the room.
RSVP for Learning—“Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.”
The quote, from Herb Simon, hangs on our wall in the CTL. We return to it more than we probably let on—especially when we’re tempted to believe a clever policy or a stricter rule will do the work for us. Philosopher and educator Lily Abadal is betting on something else this fall: an actual, hand-written invitation to each of her students, asking them to do “the messy, authentic, and very human work of understanding.” It’s a small bid for the same thing Simon was pointing at—the student’s own thinking, which only the student can do.
Your Weekly Moment of Zen
The Weekly Moment of Zen is often about finding adjacent inspiration. Is it also a rip off of the longstanding Daily Show segment of the same name? Absolutely. Everything is a remix. Think of it as a final stamp on each week’s post. Typically it’s not explicitly teaching and learning related, but if you squint hard enough we think you’ll see some parallels.
This week’s Moment of Zen comes from one of our favorite Zen adjacent sites, Window Swap. At the push of a button you can be transported to some other part of the world. Before typing this sentence we went to Moldova, South Carolina, and Santorini in under a minute and learned absolutely nothing useful—on purpose.
Thus concludes this week’s Thursday’s Three Things. We’ll see you next week
Thanks for the shoutout!