A traditional curricular scope and sequence, lets face can limit the imagination. Any pacing guide forces teachers and students alike into a routine often with little wiggle room to alter. So teachers either have to move faster or leave out some activities that may not truly fit their curriculum. Every lesson has to be purposeful and relevant and connected to the educational standards. Concise instructions create fine lines that students must stay within to achieve the goal. Open-ended questions steer students into a realm of possibility but they often come with an expectation that students should answer it in a particular fashion using certain words or phrases. Still, unfortunately in the box in many cases. So how do we provide opportunities for students to think for themselves, find relevance and interest and also tie back to the standards? The best prompts come from a students ideas, their misconceptions, their curiosity and experience. If they wonder about something they are much more likely going to put thought into answering a prompt, or tinkering and creating something about it. If they find something challenging or a dilemma they want to solve they will dive right in and write or build. But if they have already solved it, or find it mundane or uninteresting they will only answer due to compliance. This is what I never want to see, compliance. I am aiming for investigation, hankering. and cynosure. I believe that if students are taught how they think and process information and are guided to being able to teach themselves all of these will fall into place. Ownership means attentiveness and enthusiasm, at least in my experience.
When students ask questions they should be provided time to mull them over and come up with an answer either independently or collaboratively. However, far too often the pacing gets in the way and students are robbed of powerful learning opportunities by teachers setting the prompt or being too prescriptive or limiting. Martinez and Stager, in Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom, explain that there are three tips that one should follow when writing prompts for students: brevity, ambiguity, and immunity to assessment. Three tips I have integrated into my classroom. The best prompts do fit on a post it note. Quick and concise. Too many words seems to create anxiety in many students. Less is more. When students see it written briefly on the board, they think "oh, this isn't a long prompt, this should be easy." Gets them in the right frame of mind. That is where I want them, focused and open-minded, because truthfully writing is not always something they want to do. Building however is. I use many of the same prompts for both "writing in moments" and "makerspace" activities.
Ambiguity is also very important because students should feel free to take their responses in any direction they feel comfortable with. I even allow my students to reword the prompt so they can venture off in endless directions. The more vague I am the more creative and imaginative they become. I write one word on the board. One simple word like -change. Then wait to see what they come up with. I did this the other day. I got models of catastrophic events, succession drawings, short stories about digestion- how food changes in the digestive tract. All I prefaced the task with was it had to tie to science in some way. They just jumped right in because change is virtually everywhere all the time so, they had endless possibilities to choose from. They also could write or design and build. When they feel empowered with out consequence, they will leap. When they feel comfortable to take risks without penalty of failure, they will immerse themselves in learning. They will accomplish great things because feeling safe to explore is the first step in creating a safe haven where all learners can tinker and play and thus grow academically and socially.
Immunity to assessment is so important for prompts. They are informal for me. Not everything needs to be graded. I never tell my students what is going to be graded or not. We do so many things I usually just observe the prompts. This doesn't sway them from participating and having fun. They love to learn and so when I give them concise, short prompts that are ambiguous they see them as opportunities to surprise me. I always say that. "Be mysterious, interesting, nerdy and surprise me with your intellectual prowess." I also say "Just enjoy learning because this is not about a grade but about growth and seeing that you can take risks and great things will happen." Prompts are a tool I use through out the day: sometimes they have 1-minute to write or 5 minutes to design and create a model. I keep them short because they are meant to be rapid fire learning I call it. Bursts of ingenuity. These prompts give me great insight into my students with very little effort, they are not graded and not the focus but simply a time to tinker and play which is so important for the development of our students. Learning needs to be varied between quiet reflection, spontaneity and synthesis. Prompts are a great bridge between the three.
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