Day 4--Open Questions and Parallel Tasks

My first reaction to reading this article was an actual sigh of relief.  Finally,  someone was able to articulate what I have been feeling and saying for some time now.  Not only that, but she is a well-respected professional to boot.  My concern has been the pendulum shift to the left, where the big picture and inquiry learning is the buzz of today.  I often feel like kids who are more linear thinkers, kids who don't excel at looking at the big picture, are often left behind.  The article and subsequent discussions make it clear that we have to teach to all students and this, sometimes, means explicit teaching of formulas and rules.

We had quite a good discussion in our group about whether or not using open questions does a disservice to our children, since the teacher after us may not use open questions and it may be difficult for our student to transition.  My thought on the matter is that we can not worry ourselves about what the teacher after us does.  We have a responsibility to our students to teach in a way that we believe will give them greatest opportunity to be successful. 

I have to admit that open questions and parallel tasks are new concepts to me.  As someone who admittedly  both thinks and teaches from the right, the idea of asking a question with multiple answers or solutions is going to take some getting used to, but I can see the value in it.  I can see how important it is because of the exercises we did in class with the snap cubes.  There were a number of ways to look at the same problem.  If it was a classroom and we had only taught the problem one way, we would have missed all the other ways of student knowing and understanding.

There were a lot of good things that came out of today's class, but I think the most salient point for me was when Marian Small said that whatever kind of teacher we are, we should "be different" some of the time.  For me, this means stepping outside my comfort zone and teaching a little more from the left, where I may not be comfortable, but where I have to go nonetheless in order to meet the needs of my students.