As I read the final chapter of Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question (2014) and explored the ideas of Thomas Friedman on Passion Quotient and Curiosity Quotient, I couldn’t help but think that passion and curiosity are really at the center of everything that we do. Starting from the youngest age, we are constantly making observations and questioning the world around us. We want to know why things happen, how they happen, where someone is going, what is going to happen next…the questions are endless. I am always reminded of this intense curiosity by my Kindergarten students, who remind me to lead with questions and not take for granted the fact that adults have so many “answers”. As a Kindergarten teacher, I try my best to lean into my students’ curiosities to help them learn. If they have a big question, we explore it together as a class. We think of ways to find answers and we go on quests to discover answers or solutions to our problems. There is nothing more passionate than a five-year-old who wants to understand their world. However, I do not only use curiosity and passion to help my students learn. One of my goals as an educator is to continue to grow and learn in my profession. I am driven by the love that I have for my students and my career (my passion), and by the fact that I know there is always more out there to learn and discover. To show this, I created a mind map of how passion and curiosity influence my actions in the classroom. I have no doubt that this map will continue to grow as I move through my profession with these new ideas, but here is where I am at the moment: Figure 1. Passion, curiosity, questioning, and the classroom (own image).
References: Warren Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Bloomsbury. Dickson, J. (2015, May 9). (PQ+CQ)>IQ every time, author Thomas Friedman tells Ottawa crowd. iPolitics. https://ipolitics.ca/2015/05/09/pqcqiq-every-time-author-thomas-friedman-tells-ottawa-crowd/. Fraeyman, H. (2021). Passion, curiosity, questioning, and the classroom. [Image]. Friedman, T. (2013, January 29). It's the P.Q. and C.Q. as much as the I.Q. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/opinion/friedman-its-pq-and-cq-as-much-as-iq.html. Runnymede Capital Management. (2016). Tom Friedman's advice to millennials [Video]. Runnymede Capital Management. http://blog.runnymede.com/tom-friedmans-advice-to-millennials.
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Over the past six weeks, I have been working through a wicked problem – how can I create the best possible experience for my Kindergarteners? This past school year was my first year as a teacher, and my first experience in a Kindergarten classroom. I very quickly learned that Kindergarten is not the same as other grades, even first grade, just one step above. As I sought advice about what was best practice for Kindergarten and what my Kindergarten classroom should look like, I received mixed responses. I realized that I would have to dig deeper to understand what an excellent Kindergarten classroom really looks like.
My question is very broad and can take on a lot of different forms, and even though I have spent time working towards a solution, I do not think I am done exploring. As I sought answers to my question, I surveyed other Kindergarten teachers to get more opinions and information. I read research about play in Kindergarten. I looked back on the history of Kindergarten and how it began. This all led me to my current conclusion that Kindergarten needs more play. To read and learn about my experience, please click here or head to “The Kindergarten Experience” tab on the left. I do not think I am done exploring, and will hopefully have new answers to my question in the future. This week I continued exploring my wicked problem: How do I create the best possible Kindergarten experience? This is a broad topic to explore, but it one that is near and dear to my heart as a new Kindergarten teacher. In order to dive deeper, I chose to create a survey that focuses on prioritizing play in Kindergarten classrooms.
As an educator, master’s student, and recent college grad, I am very familiar with surveys. Especially after this Covid school year, I have participated in more surveys than I can count. As I began designing my own, I kept these previous surveys in mind. I quickly learned that survey design is no easy feat. I chose to use the Qualtrics survey platform because I have taken surveys on it before and have enjoyed the professional, sleek feel. I am personally a fan of more multiple choice questions over other types, so I made sure to include those. However, as a data collector, I saw value in adding some short answer response questions as well. I had to be particularly aware of what I was asking in each question and how I was asking it to ensure that I wasn’t driving my participants to answer a certain way. However, I also had to be specific enough in order to yield results that would help me with my wicked problem. I had to pay close attention to the flow of the questions so that they made sense, but I also had to make sure that one question wouldn’t influence the answer of the next. Good survey design is a balancing act – one that I am hopeful I was able to achieve. Creating a sketchnote style video this week was a brand new experience for me. I have always been drawn to this style of video for viewing because it has the ability to present a LOT of information in a very easy to follow way. The viewer gets to be more involved than just sitting and listening to someone talk. I chose to create a completely digital sketchnote video. The reason I did that was because my question sticky notes that I was sorting were already digital, and I wanted the overall look of the video to be consistent. This also gave me a unique challenge to figure out how to combine different apps and even different digital devices to create the output I was looking for. I used both my laptop and my iPad, and I combined Google Jamboard, the Goodnotes app, iMovie, and the Voice Memo app that was on my computer (because the voice recording in iMovie was not working). Check out my video: Fraeyman, H. (2021). Sketchnote video - CEP 812 [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/2_eqAfWoEuI Using a sketchnote style video in the classroom would be a great way to creatively showcase student work. As a Kindergarten teacher, I would have to be very involved in the process. However, I could see myself using this to share drawings or crafts with parents in a way that allows them to be part of the process. A sketchnote video would also be cool to make as a year-long project to show to progression of student writing and letter formation. How would you use a sketchnote style video in your classroom?
What do we gain from asking questions? Who usually asks the most questions? Why don’t we ask questions more often? These are all ideas that are explored in the first few sections of Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question (2014), and they are ideas that I explored myself this past week. Berger, W. [cover image]. (2014). A more beautiful question: the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Bloomsbury. The first step in asking questions is to determine what a good question is. Good questions go beyond asking for the definition or the surface reason behind something. As Berger states in his book, good questions are not something you can find the answer to on the internet (Berger, 2014). They go deeper and get to the root cause of a problem. Good questions have the potential to bring about change and to make improvements upon existing ideas. As I began to ask questions about my own practice (we’ll get to those later), the idea of change was at the front of my mind. I began to think about what I wanted to see change in my own classroom, school, and profession. I also thought about what my colleagues might want to change about our profession. The driving force behind my questioning was “what do we want to change, and how can we change it?” If I were to compare myself to my colleagues at work, I think that I have an advantage when it comes to asking questions – especially those that challenge the status quo. As a new teacher who has only spent one year at my school, I don’t know how things “usually” work. I have no set ways to fall back on, so even a simple question like “why do we line up for lunch this way?” has the potential to bring about change. I think this is the nature of questions that can scare some people. They make the “experts” stop and think about the real reasoning behind decisions and structures and routines. Figure 1 shows the questions that I came up with in a five-minute window regarding my teaching practice: Figure 1. Quickfire, Google Jamboard (own image). When I starting thinking of my questions, I was thinking small scale. I started off with questions about my own classroom, grade level, and students. This felt like a safe space to start because I am the one who is in charge there. By questioning my own classroom, I am not questioning anybody in authority over me, I am only questioning myself. This felt safer because I wasn’t pushing any boundaries or challenging anybody else’s ideas. Next, I found myself thinking about my colleagues and some of the complaints they have shared about education as a structure and system. I began to ask questions that could serve as a starting block to make changes in education as a whole. These questions were more broad, but could lead to more specific questions down the line. These were things like “why are teachers unhappy?” and “Who is responsible for fixing education?” By this point, I was about halfway through my five minutes, and I was feeling stuck. I began to draw inspiration from things I had read and conversations I had overheard. The questions that stemmed from here felt less personal and therefore, a bit less interesting to me. I didn’t have as strong of a connection to questions like “why do policy makers feel disconnected from the classroom” and “is Kindergarten what it should be?” because these were questions that I had heard other people ask, not questions that I have often thought about myself.
After I was finished, I read my questions back to myself. By doing so, I was able to identify which ones actually resonated with me and which ones were simply recycled questions that I had heard before. This gave me a unique opportunity to take a look at what I really think is important about my profession. The questions that still spoke to me when I reread them told me what I thought was worth questioning (and therefore, worth changing). The ones that I didn’t feel strongly about showed me I don’t currently have the same concerns as some others in my profession. References: Warren Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Bloomsbury. During my first year of teaching, I was faced with several students who just did not want to write. Every day during writer’s workshop was a battle. Students who were able to confidently participate in our phonics lessons - decoding words and spelling them verbally - and students who could tell stories orally until they were blue in the face simply refused to write. They would complain that their hand hurt, or that they were still thinking of their ideas, or that they were working on their picture still. Even as a first-year teacher, I quickly caught on to the fact that complaints and excuses from five-year-old kids usually mean those kids are frustrated. The challenge for me was figuring out where their frustration was coming from. As I researched the topic of writing reluctance, one disorder that I came across multiple times was dysgraphia. According to Peter J. Chung, dysgraphia, in its most general definition, is defined as “a disorder of writing ability at any stage, including problems with letter formation/legibility, letter spacing, spelling, fine motor coordination, rate of writing, grammar, and composition.” (Chung, et al. 2020). Dysgraphia is often unrecognized in individuals, and instead those individuals are labeled as sloppy or lazy in writing. This can impact students’ self-esteem and willingness to write (Chung, et al. 2020). One way to support students with dysgraphia is to allow them to take frequent breaks to help combat the fatigue that they experience due to the stress of writing. Students can also participate in pre-writing skills, like drawing geometric shapes that represent letters or copying letters from a model (Rostami, et al. 2014). These exercises will help students build the necessary muscles in their hands to be able to eventually begin writing letters, words, and sentences.
References: Chung, P. J., Patel, D. R., & Nizami, I. (2020). Disorder of written expression and dysgraphia: definition, diagnosis, and management. Translational pediatrics, 9(Suppl 1), S46–S54. Rostami, A., Allahverdi, F., & Mousavi, F. (2014). Dysgraphia: The causes and solutions. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 4(2), 7. |
AuthorI am a graduate student at Michigan State University and a Kindergarten teacher. ArchivesCategories |