“Questions open a space in your mind that allow better answers to breathe.”
― Richard Norton
For so many of us – and our students -- the research paper is a millstone that we are all endlessly pushing uphill. Years ago, I started asking students what they would love to learn about and had a pretty good time setting them free to do just that. Teaching a community college composition course, “Critical Thinking,” was a challenge because so many of the papers I had been assigning became excellent reports sometimes with no critical thinking at all. I started to address this concern by having students develop excellent critical questions – ones that could not be easily answered at all, ones that demanded high level of critical thinking. These questions by definition would have no definitive answer, would spark legitimate disagreement, would force students to evaluate their resources – exactly what I was looking for. Teaching online has provided some opportunities for rethinking how to generate these good questions. Join us for a session on how to do just that.
Intended Audience: 6th - 16th Grade Teachers
Laury Fischer is supposedly retired, but finds himself still teaching – now as a part-time instructor at Diablo Valley College, where he “retired” in 2016. After over forty years teaching high school and community college, and doing workshops for teachers all over the world, like all of us, Laury finds himself in a strange place he never intended to be: teaching online to students who are just as reluctant as he is to be there. And despite this, there are still moments of joy – even in Zoom World.