What should be my (our) guiding questions?
I believe that guiding questions are important. As our world changes radically and rapidly, we may not have answers (yet) but we can at least try to ask the right questions. Here are some guiding questions that I’ve been bouncing around for my own work with educators, schools, communities, and policymakers [note that they’re often very different from the questions that most educational reformers, legislators, and the public are asking right now]:
- What can we do to increase the cognitive complexity of students’ day-to-day work so that they are more often doing deeper thinking and learning work?
- What can we do to better incorporate digital technologies into students’ deeper thinking and learning work in ways that are authentic, relevant, meaningful, and powerful?
- What can we do to give students more agency and ownership of what they learn, when they learn, how they learn, and how they show what they’ve learned?
- What can we do to better recognize and assess when students’ deeper thinking and learning work is (or isn’t) occurring? [ADDED at suggestion of Lynne Schrum]
- What can we do to build the internal capacity of both individual educators and school systems to be better learners and faster change agents?
- As we move toward more cognitively-complex, technology-suffused learning environments, how do we bring educators, board members, parents, communities, policymakers, and higher education along with us?
- As we move toward more cognitively-complex, technology-suffused learning environments, how do we ensure that traditionally-underserved student and family populations aren’t further disadvantaged?
- As we move toward more cognitively-complex, technology-suffused learning environments, what individual and societal mindsets – and local, state, and federal policy supports and/or barriers – need reconsideration?
- How do we balance competing (often unproductive) demands from other fronts so that we can do this important work? [NEW]
What do you think? Am I (are we) asking the right questions? What questions should be changed/added?
Got answers to any of these?!
Image credit: sensitive noise / obvious 2