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Tag: Student Engagement

Oct292020

What is a Calling?

While I teach my students primarily online, I have some designated time with them in a seventy-five minute afternoon session, held once a week. While these sessions are designed to offer a space for continued study and socially distanced peer interaction, I also use this time as a means for getting to know my students on a level beyond academics. My afternoon sessions have become more of a reflection of self and purpose, both academically and personally.

In keeping with this theme, I am a fan of Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays because I can always find a short video clip of an interview seasoned with meaning and most fitting for personal reflection. This past week, my students and I watched Oprah’s interview with Steven Pressfield entitled “First Look: 4 Questions to Help you Find Your Calling.” Following our viewing session, some students were perplexed about the idea of a calling, while others were most confident about identifying the calling they finally had an opportunity to identify and share.

I asked students to select a question or two from below and share their response(s) on the classroom blackboard.

  1. What is a calling?
  2. Where does one’s calling exist?
  3. Is a calling spiritual?
  4. What is your calling?
  5. What wonderings do you have after watching the short clip?

Following our blackboard reflection session, we spent about twenty-five to thirty minutes sharing perspectives and questions. I was pleased to discover the following:

  • While the majority of students believed they were too young to know their “calling,” both my boarding and day student group included at least two to three students who identified their calling.
  • About half of my students believed that a calling is not spiritual. Rather, these students believed a calling is the result of lived experiences.
  • While the majority agreed that a calling should bring joy to one’s life, students couldn’t define the true definition of joy, so they settled for aligning one’s calling with a feeling of sustained happiness.
  • One student asked if playing video games is his calling because he is happy and looses track of time when he plays.
  • Every student coalesced with the idea that finding one’s calling must be prioritized as the ultimate goal in life.

What is your calling? How and when did you discover this calling? What are your overall thoughts about the idea of “a calling”? Also, if additional understanding is required, another great example by author Wes Moore can be found here. I’m always looking forward to your your responses…

 

Sep142018

Why is the Essential Question Essential?

Why is the Essential Question Essential?

What is an essential question? I remember when I was in my capstone course at Temple University when my professor posed this question to my cohort and me. He said the essential question is essential for framing a unit. You can “hook” students into whatever stories you read in the unit by connecting all of these stories to a question that they will continue to investigate.

I didn’t quite understand how one question could possibly address all of the texts read in one unit at the time. I initially considered this one question to be quite limiting. I thought, why should we create the same question for reflection across texts? Why not investigate different questions and ideas?…

While reflecting on the challenges I had with constructing an essential question, the jazz tune “I Can’t Get Started (With You)” by Ira Gershwin, sung by Ella Fitzgerald, came to mind; I simply could not understand how one question could apply to all readings. I had difficulties getting started myself.

Today, I understand more than ever before why the essential question is dynamic. The essential question allows for:

  1. Purposeful reading: Students read with intention and use the question as a guide for deeper understanding
  2. A starting point for further investigation: While students are learning how to formulate their own questions, the essential question is a starting point
  3. Higher order thinking: The essential question should be an open-ended question. This creates a space for students to begin investigating other aspects of a given text
  4. Transfer of Learning: The essential question transfers from one reading to the next. Considering this, students have the opportunity to critically think about how this question applies in different contexts
  5. Interdisciplinary connections: Students understand how to apply the question across disciplines for a more dynamic learning experience

Michael Smith (my professor in the capstone course) and Jeffrey Wilhelm both agree in Going with the Flow (2006) that for an essential question to work, it must be debatable and most of all, it must be meaningful. To provide you with an idea of what makes an essential question, the following are five questions created according to the aforementioned criteria:

  1. How can literature serve as a vehicle for social change?
  2. How does conflict lead to change?
  3. What is truth and who defines it?
  4. What is reality and how is it constructed?
  5. What does it mean to be invisible?

Overall, these questions are created while backward planning and reflecting on what is essential for students to know and understand in a unit. Most importantly, these questions help when guiding students into more critical areas of inquiry. What essential questions do you and have you used in your classroom? In what ways have these questions changed the way you approach a unit? I’m looking forward to your comments….