I think it’s important to remember to have guiding questions on hand to help students with the “big” prompt or essential question. Good constructivist learning is connected to big ideas or concepts. Using these big concepts and essential questions to lead students to their discovery or guide them back on the right path.

I recommend reading Papert’s The Children’s Machine as well as

Tim, thanks for your comments!

Sounds like you’re looking for ways to engage them, but it may take some handholding at first. They’re not always used to thinking this way, but as teachers we can teach thinking just like we can teach content.

Glad to see that you value thinking.

I’d love to attend one of Gary’s sessions. I just started reading Mindstorms… it has me thinking/questioning quite a bit.

Sorry if I’ve hijacked your comments here Brian. What a great post!

What’s interesting, JackieB, is that in many of the prompts Gary shared as examples don’t fumble over words at all. Instead, they seem to leave a lot of words out and this leads to a lot of out-of-the-box thinking. Sometimes a prompt that is too loaded with words is also too loaded with rules, and that can stifle creativity and invention.

Gary was working with us on programmable brick (Lego), and some of his prompts were “Build a machine that can blow bubbles,” or “Build a machine that can hit a baseball.” There is nothing in the prompt stating HOW these things are to be done, just that they are to be done. The possibilities are endless and multiple interpretations led to very innovative results.

I love the good prompt quote, and am now mulling over the idea of “ish.”

Failure gets the short stick sometimes. I know I won’t write the best blog posts and I will also fail to write sometimes when I should, but I will keep at it as I know it’s important to my own learning. Perseverance should be a basic principle students should master early on in their education, right along with learning how to learn.

There are two aspects of this post that jumped out at me. The first was the quote from Gary, “A good prompt is worth 1000 words”. This is still something I struggle with in my classes -wording a really good prompt that is open-ended enough to let the learners explore and isn’t so ambiguous that they don’t understand the question.

The second was the idea of doing it well-ish. Too many people see failure in not doing something perfectly the first time. One of my goals for next year is to do a better job at cultivating a classroom environment where a “mistake” is an opportunity to examine thinking and extend it.

Thanks for sharing your experiences and thoughts.