Session 4: What do you want to know?

We came up with lots of ways we could get ourselves and students to ponder what they want to find out about a topic. These include listing, fulfilling each of the question word prompts (who, what, where, when, how, why...), drawing a scene, schematic or map. Another idea was to make a web that contained a question in the center of each and then resources coming off of it. The resources could then be linked sometimes (for example, you might interview the same person for 3 of your questions, but not use the same piece of literature). Let us know what questions you came up with and what process you used to gather them.

Here is Rob's

Here is Ellen's

Session 4: What do you know?

After generally deciding on what topics we wanted to pursue, we thought we should narrow down our questions and figure out some resources for researching. However, it seemed important to perhaps first think, write, draw, etc. about what we already know, allowing us to get deeper and better questions to follow. We agreed this would be important for students as well. We also thought you could do a sorting activity after students brainstormed what they already knew. This would involve them/us putting our "what we know" into categories of something like "for sure" and "assumptions." It is often true that what we think we know is not always accurate or fully realized and it would be valuable for people to be aware of this. Let's hear what you already know about your topics!