What happens when we let STUDENTS Ask the Questions? (Part 1)

What happens when we empower students to ask the questions?

Where has the school year gone?!?!  I haven’t written in forever, I need to make myself write more consistently throughout the school year.

As the school year draws to a close, I am already (like all of you I’m sure!) thinking of what I will change/tweak/completely redo for next year.  To give me inspiration, I am making some time to read!  Here are two books I’ve read, and one more I’m currently reading:

• Innovator’s Mindset by George Couros
• Empower by John Spencer and A.J. Juliani
• Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had by Tracy Zager (currently)

I want to move to more student-centric learning next year, and I feel like I’ve been moving this direction for some time.  All three of these books are giving me great ideas on how to get there.  One common thing I’m reading into these I that to be more student-centric, I need to give students more ownership in their learning and let them experience the empowerment of answering questions THEY came up with.  The learning will be more sticky if students come up with their own questions to answer than if I give them a prescribed set of questions.

The Plan

So as the school year closes, I’m trying out an activity that I’m thinking of using the first week of school next year.  Students are so used to waiting for me to ask them all of the questions, sometimes they have forgotten that they can come up with lots of great questions I may never have even thought of!  So I want to give them a chance to practice asking and answering their own questions in a very general/open/non-scary way.

For my Algebra 1 and Math Foundations classes, I plan to set out 10-15 objects/topic descriptions on my desk, and let students look through them.  A few examples of topics include:

• Deck of Cards
• SET Card Game
• Gears
• Map Coloring Theorem
• Tessellations
• And many more!  See the rest (as well as some descriptions and directions)

They will pick an object/topic and generate 3-5 questions they would like to try to answer.  Then, they will spend the next 3 days or so trying to answer 1-2 of their own questions!  They will research, play, and create something to show the class next Monday (last regular day of school).  This could be slides of pictures along the way, examples they show under the document camera, a video, artwork, etc.  They are also allowed to pick something that isn’t in my list, as long as it’s something they are interested in exploring the mathematics of.

I’m very excited to see all of the possibilities and awesome ideas!  I will add some pictures and some ideas of what students are working on this week (part 2) and I will share some reflections once students present their work next week (part 3).

Do you have a few days at the end of the school year that you want to use to have some exploration time?  Consider letting students do a free exploration like this one!  I just used objects that I already had laying around, and put together some quick descriptions of topics they might want to do a little quick research about.