“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”― Albert Einstein
Whether or not I consider my day as productive often is directly related to how much I produced. I’ve been writing some exams for my doctoral program and found I feel much more accomplished when I can say “I wrote 10 pages today,” rather than “I wrote a paragraph.” They both may have taken the same amount of time, but one is certainly more impressive than the other.
When you tell students they have, for example, a five-page paper they need to write, students will focus on the length they must produce.
How do I write that much on that topic? Will she notice if I adjust the margins? I heard that increasing the size of each period works too…
The whole reason why we have assessments is we want something representative of what’s going on in kid’s brains, but often get caught up in those details instead of the work needed behind the scenes.
When discussing an unproductive day in terms of written work—but particularly productive in preparing my thoughts and understandings—a friend of mine shared the Einstein quote above. Always being in C3 mode, I immediately thought about how that mindset should apply to conducting social studies inquiries.
We need to have assessments where students communicate conclusions and take informed action. As important as culminating assignments are, we also need to think very intentionally about understanding the problem, rather than focusing on finding a solution. Approaching an essay requires one determine the main components, understanding those components, then determining the collective story they tell.
One of the reasons our compelling questions can be so compelling is that they do not have an easy solution. In fact, my favorite CQs are those where I feel confident in my content knowledge, but I don’t feel that I have a conclusive answer—rather, one that is still evolving.
Inquiry, done expertly, does keep the compelling question in mind, but as the frame of the problem. The supporting questions, therefore, provide a means to chunk the problem into manageable pieces. Using an inquiry framework, such as the IDM, forces teachers and students to spend time understanding the problem.
I remember when I implemented my first inquiry, I warned students that the end product would be an essay. As you can imagine, there was a collective groan. However, by the time we had worked through our supporting questions, they were able to produce work of better quality than they had before. Answering the compelling question wasn’t necessarily easy or simple, but instead of focusing on the production of the summative assessment, they focused on understanding the inquiry’s problem. The heavy cognitive lifting had already happened.
Though we do need to intentionally consider the desired end result of our teaching, we miss something if we focus so much on the product that we lose understanding of the process needed to get there.
