Very often, we as teachers tend to do the difficult thinking and evaluating that we want our students to do.
A case in point: test review. We'll often spend hours culling through material we've taught to create review guides -- and we end up doing the kinds of high-level thinking we want the students to perform, asking
ourselves questions like:
- What is most important out of what we've learned, and why?
- What are the essential facts and pieces of discrete information?
- Why do the concepts in this unit matter?
- How do the ideas and information from this unit connect to others?
But aren't these the kinds of questions, ideally, that we want our students to ask?
Well, Charles Schubert has found a fast and easy way to involve his students in the heavy lifting of unit review -- he has them collaboratively compose unit reviews on Google Docs:
Charles used the concept of "fat" and "skinny" questions that he got from Summer McCall: he has students, in groups, compose both open-ended questions that demand complex answers (the "fat" questions), and close-ended questions with concrete answers (the "skinny ones.)
Here's the process, as he describes it:
The process was just to pair them by table, have them review their notes and then brainstorm for a few minutes. I explained what "skinny" and "fat" questions were (thanks to Summer). After a few minutes brainstorming they opened the shared google doc which I set up for them by table and had them fill in two skinny questions and one fat question. They saw what other people were writing and kind of edited their questions on the fly to make theirs unique. That was pretty much it, took about 20 minutes.
They post their questions on a Google Doc, and, voila! -- instant review.
You can check out a sample,
here.
Thanks to Charles for sharing this, and to Summer for the question idea! Happy review, all.
