Final Speech Finding Your Question

1. Final SpeechFinding Your Question Ina Griffin Inquiry into teaching, Learning and School, Part I

2. Finding Your Question As you think about what you want to explore, remember that it doesn’t matter if the question you have chosen to pursue has been asked or pursued by someone else before. (Falk & Blumenreich, 2005)

3. “Discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” (Marcel Proust)

4. My QuestionWhen I began to consider my question I thought that it had to be a completely new idea. The previous quotes helped me develop confidence in the questions that I really have.

5. ??? • Why do students’ struggle with writing? • How do we as teachers differentiate between students’ with writing difficulties, and students’ who are reluctant? • How can we provide instruction that motivates all students’ to write? • How can we teach important skills without killing the creativity of our students?

6. “Inverting” the Curriculum In schools today, it seems that everything revolves around standards, accountability, and measurement. Rather than focusing on students’ abilities to learn through problem solving, student achievement is often assessed by performance on high-stakes test supposedly aligned with state standards. (Grant, 2008 p.11)

7. Students’ Choice …and then there was one week when we could write about whatever we wanted to. I liked that…because then we could choose what we wanted to write about… instead of a teacher giving you something to write about. I like that. Whenever we had free time I would read and then think about what I was going to do…ideas would come to me in the middle of math…I don’t know where they came from! So I didn’t have to do the planning part when everyone else was, because I already planned it in my mind. I like writing stories when I’m not told what I have to write. (4th grade reluctant writer)

8. “Inverting” the Curriculum If the classroom curriculum was inverted so the students’ pursuits led them to the outcome of meeting standards, the class members’ ideas could be at the forefront, rather than what someone else expected them to know or understand at a particular time. Guided by a facilitating teacher, this experiential approach encourages each student’s growth and nurtures individual development. (Schultz, 2008)

9. High-Stakes-Testing As a result of school factors, the neighborhood elements, and a hidden curriculum—a curriculum not taught but implicitly part of what is experienced and expected of students—students’ learning is often misrepresented through quantification and outside high-stakes-testing benchmarks. These issues affect how students are educated and how the specific curriculum is presented.(Schultz, 2008)