
Students again, created essential questions to focus learning on past. I was impressed with these questions and thoughts. They are asking very good questions and I assume this will continue.
We took a quiz that some students did not score highly on. The following day, I had them do the following: 1. List everything they knew about the period we were working on, 2. explain if they felt they had learned a good the last two weeks, 3. did they have pride in their work, 4. how they felt about the quiz, 5. what was the purpose of quizzes or tests.
We had a good discussion about these questions. In fact, only three children were not proud of all they had learned and what they wrote showed that. I explained the contradiction in education: the big picture (understanding) vs. the details (state testing). We talked about individual value vs. test/quiz scores. Then we took another look at the quiz and corrected it. Many missed questions, not because they don't know the content, but because they did not read carefully or they understand the question. Everyone left class with a better understanding of how to answer test questions. I think we all learned a valuable lesson today.