Life's HOTs questions

When I was first accepted into Teach For America as a senior at Duke many friends, professors and family members asked lower-level, "what, where, when" questions. "Where were you assigned to teach? What are you going to teach? When will you start? Are you excited? What do you expect?"

In my classroom, I try not to spend too much time asking my students these types of questions, but I always start with them. When I taught a unit on stars I started class with a "what" question. For the first five minutes of class I told them to write down a paragraph describing a star. I wanted to hear their thoughts about stars and wanted to see their ability to write simple explanations. It was a lower-level question, but it was necessary to get through to build to the topic's ultimate goal, which was to classify stars and predict the future life of different types of stars (a higher-level thinking process).

Now I am four months into teaching and I am finally getting life's HOTs (higher order thinking) questions. My two favorites are:"Why did you decide to do Teach For America?" and "What will you do after TFA?" Yeah, even though there's a "what" in there its asking for a prediction ;)

Unfortunately I have not been 100% honest with people who ask me the "Why" question. Usually I just say "Oh, I studied public policy and was interested in education policy and thought that TFA would be a great way to experience education policy in practice." It's a valid reason, but it's not the complete reason. 

I think the closest I've been to my more complete reason was when I bumped into a long lost friend from UNC  in the elevators at Institute. When she saw me her eyes lit up and loudly asked, "Why are you here?!" It was a really abrupt and direct way of starting the conversation, especially when everyone else around us was also probably thinking the same thing for themselves.

Without thinking twice I just blurted out, "I... want to close the achievement gap."

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I am in Teach For America because I really care about education and about the future of this country. The U.S. public education system is a cornerstone to our democracy that serves as a ladder to social and economic mobility for all its citizens. Without a strong public education system, we fail to prepare the future of America to become self-sufficient, innovative and working adults. Currently, we have a public education system that is unjust. A child's zip code will determine whether they will receive an excellent education; and that shouldn't be the case. All children in this country deserve the same opportunity to learn. I know that TFA is not the solution to the achievement gap. There is no one solution. But I want to be part of the solution.

That is my response to the "Why?" and now I have to figure out the long-term "How?" question. How will I continue to fight to close the achievement gap after my two-year commitment?

Prediction questions are tough.

At the end of teaching the unit on stars, my HOTs question for my kids was "How can you determine what stage a star is in its life cycle?" It was an interesting lesson that they enjoyed because we discussed how our Sun will change over time. Scientists predict that in about about 5 billion years our Sun will change into a Red Giant and engulf Earth. Good thing we probably won't be around for that.

Happy New Year :)