I think the QFT is a great way to build questioning skills (yay, metacognition!), build interest, and get a great view of students’ prior knowledge. It was interesting to see how many of our group’s initial questions were closed-ended (even though we already knew a lot of the background details on this image), and then how much more interesting the questions became when we opened them up. I absolutely love the idea of leading students to develop their own questions that will drive their learning. Knowing my brain, choosing the “right” QFocus will probably take me a LONG time…any tips here would be most welcome. 🙂
I like how the Four Reads strategy adds some helpful structure/guidance to the analysis of a document…seems like students could probably handle much more difficult content when it’s approached this way. I also like how such a simple thing like folding the paper up can make the task seem less overwhelming, easier to digest, and kind of mysterious. I actually like this method better than the National Archives analysis guides, which seem clunky and not quite aligned with some of the in-class uses I’ve come across thus far (I keep wanting to skip big chunks of the guide). If I’m specifically working on learning how to analyze and artifact or photo, great. So maybe use those when first teaching the skill. But if I’m using a document or image as a way to build interest, honing in on just the essential, relevant pieces (like in the Four Reads tasks) might be more effective.
Menti is so fun! I want to play around with it some to get a feel for how to incorporate it. I like that it has lots of choices to visually represent the data…good math/science connections. In the word cloud, I wish the related words would group themselves together, but that could be a fun language lesson (synonyms, precision in word choice, word gradients, etc.) — to print and cut a recent word cloud apart and sort/reorganize it. Or, we could group into broad categories and then do the cloud again to see how it changed.
Again, I really appreciated the dual-level teaching…giving us a taste of the student experience, and also explicitly addressing the teaching strategy. Thank you!