Teacher extraordinaire Diana Laufenberg shared a simple and useful series of tweets about a project she’s doing with her class
She calls it the “History of Anything” Project.
Diana is planning on doing a more extensive write-up of what she does (and here it is — you can ignore the rest of this post and just go to read what she has now written), but I think the info in these four tweets can be useful right now for just about any teacher:
Step One: Write about three different topics that you would be interested in investigating for a history of anything project.
— Diana Laufenberg (@dlaufenberg) March 26, 2014
Step Two: Write down three investigation questions for each of the three topics. #historyofanything
— Diana Laufenberg (@dlaufenberg) March 26, 2014
Step Three: Investigate the answers to the questions. Step Four: Choose one of the topics to pursue. #historyofanything
— Diana Laufenberg (@dlaufenberg) March 26, 2014
Students r filling out their contracts 4 History of Anything project today – https://t.co/t57LMCrSxl #sschat (unit: https://t.co/I6vqqrOUbQ)
— Diana Laufenberg (@dlaufenberg) April 11, 2014
If you look at these four Tweets in order, you can see how empowering Ms. Laufenberg is. She is not telling the students what to do, but neither is she creating chaos by allowing them to do whatever they want to do. Instead, she guides their experience by first asking them to select items that they would like to study. She then challenges them to identify specific things about these items that they want to study. In other words, she challenges them to ask questions. A good question is key to high quality research. Then, once they have learned enough about each topic to make an intelligent decision she asks students to do a deeper dive on one. Very impressive process!! Thanks for sharing.
@apasseducation