Using Student-Generated Questions to Promote Deeper Thinking

Please read this fascinating article posted on Edutopia; Understanding how people learn and reliably commit things to memory is what prompted psychology professor Mirjam Ebersbach and her colleagues at the University of Kassel to study how students prepare for an exam, and what strategies yielded the optimal improvements in student learning. Learn how asking students to create their own questions has a powerful impact on learning. “Question generation promotes a deeper elaboration of the learning content,” Ebersbach told Edutopia. “One has to reflect what one has learned and how an appropriate knowledge question can be inferred from this knowledge.” Plus, 5 tips to encourage high-quality questions and ideas to incorporate student-generated questions into your classroom. I especially love the idea of playing Jeopardy with students! To create the game, specialized software isn’t even necessary: The researchers in the study used the wiki feature in the class’s learning management system to create a 6x5 table with each cell containing a question. Similarly, you can use PowerPoint or Google Slides to create the Jeopardy! game grid. Having good questions helps inquiry into data; the questions always come first and are vital for insights. That’s why at LAC we always strongly recommend following the road map to building data culture you can see below.

The very first step is to determine what you value most about your learners and formulate the questions you want to pursue, even before you start identifying what data you have or may need.

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From Mission to Metrics

Last week a new LAC school presented me with an interesting question: “ How do we know we’re meeting our mission? ”. It’s the kind of question that we often ask ourselves at accreditation season, but how many schools can truly answer with confidence and evidence? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that unpacking this question is no different to any other data dive we might do. It requires us to understand what we’re measuring, to find a range of data to analyse, and then to use all that evidence to gain a deeper and more holistic understanding of our current situation and future goals. Step 1: Translating values into visible behaviours What does our mission look like in action? When we are living our mission, our values align with our actions. Let’s take “lifelong learning” as an example phrase we often see in mission statements. Schools that value lifelong learning will likely have administrators that promote and encourage staff professional development...

Using Social and Emotional Data to Promote a Positive School Culture

I came across this great article on Edutopia by Victoria Curry and Mike Setaro on how school leaders can combine traditional data with social and emotional data to get a full picture of the school experience of students and staff. It’s centered around Warm data that gives both dimension and measure to an individual’s and group’s social and emotional status. Opposite to Cool data points, that are a series of structural data sets such as enrollment, attendance, and academic proficiency that typically are the bedrock of school-based analytics. They talk about various examples of Warm data points among them on a matrix with different degrees of pleasantness and energy before engaging in learning (inspired by Mark Brackett’s work). These points can and should be captured, measured and visualized. The insights from this data should be of utmost importance for leaders to find strategies that capture and leverage information related to SEL and interpersonal skills. Harnessing this level of und...

The End of Year Data Handover

“And then she went to the porridge of the Little Wee Bear, and tasted it, and that was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right, and she liked it so well that she ate it all up, every bit!” — Goldilocks and the Three Bears For many of us, the sun is shining and we are in the mad dash of wrapping things up before escaping for a well deserved summer. I suspect it would be an easy task if wrapping up was all we had to do, but of course it’s never that simple in a school. We don’t just pack up our class, we need to hand them over to next year’s division and teachers, and get ready to receive our next batch. The data handover is enormous, and figuring out the what and how requires a “Goldilocks” attitude - we’ve got to get it just right. Quantity: Sharing enough to inform, but not so much that it will overwhelm next year’s teachers. Ingredients: Not sharing just numbers, but also anecdotal records and holistic data that will help teachers know students better and so...

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