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Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions – One small change can yield big results

"When you ask the question, you feel like it’s your job to get the answer, and you want to figure it out."

Students in Hayley Dupuy’s sixth-grade science class at the Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto, Calif., are beginning a unit on plate tectonics. In small groups, they are producing their own questions, quickly, one after another: What are plate tectonics? How fast do plates move? Why do plates move? Do plates affect temperature? What animals can sense the plates moving? They raise questions "that we never would have thought of if we started to answer the first question we asked," says one of the students. "And just when you think you already know the question you want to focus on, you realize: ‘Oh, wow, here’s this other question that is so much better, and that’s really what you need to think about.’"

By DAN ROTHSTEIN and LUZ SANTANA – Harvard Education Letter

Full Story: http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/507

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