Presentation on Chapter 5 (Prensky)

Planning: Content to Questions, Questions to Skills on Prezi

This chapter was about the new planning under the partnering pedagogy, which is instead of creating traditional lesson plans, you are turning content into guiding questions to lead students on a hunt for information.  The chapter focused on creating good guiding questions: questions that are tied to curriculum, open-ended, requrie complex answers, tied to real world context and problems and student passions, and require student action.  The chapter's second focus was on planning "verbs", the skills students learn and practice while they are answering guiding questions.

There were a couple ideas I really found appealing in this chapter.  The first was creating guiding questions that would encourage investigation and exploration rather than me simply telling students what they need to know.  I think using open-ended questions are a great way to have studens practice criticaly thinking and to show them that having the "right" answer is not always the best approach.  There isn't always just one right answer in life, and it would be good for students to get into practice of searching for possibilities.  I also like the idea of tying what we are learning in class to real world situations.  For example, instead of just reading short stories, students could create their own to submit to magazines for publication, etc.

The one idea I found great in theory but difficult in practice is tying every lesson to individual student passions.  I'm sure students would be more engaged if they could all relate to every lesson, but in practice it sounds like an overwhelming amount of work and planning.  Students can relate schoolwork to their passions in the books they choose to read, short story they choose to write and maybe type of project they choose to work on; there are many possibilities.  But, on an everyday basis, it is great in theory but difficult in practice