The Importance of the right Questions
Bill Farren over at Education for Well-being posts what I believe is the heart of the matter about all this talk about reform: the power to ask the right questions.
Are we asking students to wonder? To question? Or are we just asking them to tell us what was said? Are we asking them to consider the Big Questions, the ones that don’t come from textbooks?
I think that we’re not asking ourselves as citizens or educators the right questions. Do we wonder what kind of learning environments we can create? Do we question why so many students and new professionals leave school? Are we asking Big Questions about sustainability, or how to put more joy in learning, or make room for the soul to show up in our schools?
I think the answer is clearly no. Yet we continually do the same things, teach the same mandated and irrelevant curricula, ring the bells every 50 minutes, and quit learning from June to September. What insanity! And we’re the adults, the “professionals”.
Maybe it would be good to start next year—the very first day—with this poem as a reminder of how important our listening, relationships and explorations will be this year.