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About Me
- Martha Thibodeau
- Having been in the regular classroom for 22 years, I appreciate the complexities of teaching today. For the last three years I have been a Certified eMINTS Trainer/Mentor and my job is to coach teachers in using inquiry-based teaching in a technology-rich environment. Working with 19 different school districts is a challenging job, but one I look forward to every day.
6 comments:
Essential questions are used to get people to think in a deeper way. To answer one, you need to research, and use the information in a more complex way....use higher level thinking skills.
One great thing about them is there are as many good answers as there are people working on the question.
Gloree
Essential questions allow an individual to make connections with the topic at a personal level. Everyone has their own interpretation of a situation and it allows the individual to bring forth their own life experiences and connect it to the topic in a meaningful way.
Essential questions push students to gather information and make logical conclusions based on the information and their own experiences. You never know what students will answer with an essential question. It's a great way to see how a mind can really work when given the opportunity to branch out.
Mary
It was fun how we got to fight for our opinion on the essential questions. The fact that the students are not just giving us what we want to hear and actually have to do research in order support their opinion.
The part that I found most interesting was how we could change a few words to make the generic questions become essential.
Ken
I am finding that my students have a really hard time answering essential questions because they are always afraid of the right/wrong answer. Why is it that they are having a hard time grasping that it is not the answer that "really" counts but the way in which you support it that matters? How do you move them out of this frame of mind?
Mary
Mary,
I tell students that they can not be wrong if they can back what they are saying with fact or proof.
With mathematics, I feel that the essential questions are more applied mathematics. Not just punching the numbers in, theorems, definitions, formulas and so on. To use mathematics in real settings to state, formulate, solve and conclude problems is an Essential Question or Essential Problem.
It is also bringing several aspects of mathematics together or different subject matter in with mathematics that can formulate an essential question.
Gordon
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