Rationale
Once I learned I was going to attend Paul Turner’s Asking Questions in Biology Discovery versus Knowledge seminar, I began looking for resources and found Warren Berger’s book titled The Book of Beautiful Questions. My mind was racing as I reflected on my practice and wanted to explore some of his suggestions for the classroom. Berger spoke about how students need to develop their own questions and how this practice will increase student engagement. My brain immediately went to a math unit I created for the Yale National Initiative in 2023 titled “A Framework for Problem Solving: Schema Development and Discourse,” in which students had to create word problem questions when given a scenario, draw tape diagrams and solve their problems. They understood how to formulate multistep problems with different operations, which transferred to their own problem-solving ability. The discussion, engagement, and excitement for problem solving was the best I had seen in nearly thirty years as a teacher. I realized that I need to continue to teach the unit and share it as broadly as I can https://teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/units/2023/3/4. More importantly, I want to use student-formulated questions to drive learning throughout my teaching practice.
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