Students need to make their own meaning. It’s a precept of many innovative and thoughtful approaches to learning today. Yet time and time again we as educators worry if learners will get ‘the message’ of the content as they struggle to create meaning around it. We feel compelled to cover certain material that feels essential.
Yet there is a great technique for creating engaging lessons. It’s called asking good questions. Perhaps we can spend less time worrying about what we will cover, and more time crafting questions that will guide students on a journey of discovering it for themselves.
Thinking is driven by questions, not by answers. And by asking thoughtful ones, we model questioning as a key learning value for students, and curiosity as an important learning state. The Foundation for Critical Thinking has a terrific article on the importance of good questions.
Consider the Ten Commandments. What happens when we recast the central pillar of our tradition into reflective questions? And perhaps more importantly, what happens to discussion when we switch from covering to questioning?
Let's re-imagine the Ten Commandments as ten questions to engage student thinking about how they live in their world today.
- How do I imagine God?
- How do I keep my priorities straight? What gets in my way?
- What are my boundaries when it comes to Judaism?
- How can I remember Shabbat and keep it holy in a way that is meaningful for me?
- How can I honor my parents and still be an independent person, making my own decisions?
- What actions of mine might contribute to killing someone's spirit?
- Have I violated someone's trust?
- What are some ways I might have 'stolen' another person's reputation or sense of well-being through social media?
- What would happen if I lied about a friend?
- How do I react when I want the things someone else has?
You need good questions for good teaching--but you don't have to think them all up yourself. Our materials can help. My colleagues here at Behrman House spend a huge amount of time thinking about questions. We consider questioning, and the reflection it can encourage, to be among the most important elements of learning. That’s why we build thoughtful questioning into all our materials.
Our two newest courses, Jewish Holidays, Jewish Values (gr 4-6) and Our Place in the Universe (gr 6-8), provide students with questions that come from the lives they really lead, together with background and source materials to give them grounding and help them think through answers that make sense to them. They are designed to promote critical thinking and, just as important, critical mensching.
You can get a review copy of any of our materials at a 30% discount (limit one per school).
