Evolution + Education

The congruence bias is why we all jump to conclusions and stay there

We like to think of ourselves as open-minded, but we’re not. The problem is not that, once we’ve found a solution to a problem, we refuse to think of alternatives. It’s that we don’t even realize that there are alternatives to consider.

If you remember someone having a name “like Megan,” it’s going to be hard to shake the actual name out of your head. If you think that the diabolical Count is the murderer in an Agatha Christie mystery, it’s going to be hard to think of anyone else committing the crime even if he’s shown to be innocent. If you’re pretty sure you left your keys in that one old jacket you have, you’re going to keep circling back to it because it’s hard to think of other places your keys might be.

Teacher’s Most Powerful Tool: Piquing Students’ Curiosity

Learners Should Be Developing Their Own Essential Questions

Another great post from User Generated Education (who you should check out if you haven’t already). Here’s an excerpt:

Begin a New Unit with Students Developing Questions: Try starting a new unit by asking your class to think of questions that could be asked about the topic.

Create a Taxonomy of Questions: When students begin to label the different kinds of questions, they learn to select different kinds of questions to perform different kinds of thinking. No matter what the level of schooling, some kind of label can work effectively.

Ask Students to Create Questions as Homework (this would work with the Flipped Classroom): Put your classroom questioning typology to work with your homework assignments. If students read an assignment, let them form questions for the next day’s discussion. Ask them to:

write three comparison questions about the story they are reading;

identify the question the author was trying to answer;

find a question which has no answer, or two thousand answers or an infinite number of answers;

cwist has its official launch today-stop by the website and check them out.  cwist-challenges with a twist - is a parent-educator collaboration that provides an interactive library of educational, community service and outdoor challenges that help kids make a healthy connection between the things they want and the effort it takes to get them.