This picture is from way back in March.
I was being observed, had a cold, and the lesson was about how light moves.
It was one of the more interesting class periods of this year. I set up a flashlight and asked the students where they thought the light would go. To my surprise, I had kids going all around the room putting markers on the wall where they thought the light would end up when I hit the switch.
I thought that they misunderstood what I asked of them, so I repeated the question. I had them retell me the question in their own words - everything seemed fine.
We spent an hour and a half inquiring into how light moves.
I expected that part of the lesson to last 5 minutes. But, I went with where they were and had a great time.
Thank you Craig For the picture.
Edit: To get started, I had the students draw a picture of how they thought light moved, and what they drew was pretty wild. Just today, two days after I published this post, I came a cross a blog post on Inquire Within and Tasha Cowdy writes,
Unusually, the children were slow to respond and when they did, their answers were not obviously related to the question. It occurred to me that the question I had asked required the children to think abstractly about something that they had never experienced. I hadn't asked the right question, offered a meaningful invitation.
... I am reminded of the importance of framing a good research question and thinking carefully about a meaningful provocation.
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