Greetings - I hope everyone is well.  I believe the QFT (Question Formulation Technique - that is what we did on Tuesday) worked pretty well.  It was a bit of a trial to get through all the directions but I am hoping it will be a useful tools throughout the semester and perhaps serve your needs in the future.  My original intent with this effort was to focus on doing and learning science but, at the last minute, I added teaching.  And, not surprising, that was what most of the questions were about - teaching and learning.  There were not too many questions that focused on science process - but that is ok; I learned somethings from this process and hopefully you did as well.

Here are a couple of word clouds that I constructed using the questions.  This one is using all of the words:

Word Cloud for QFT Questions - 1/24/12

 It is pretty clear that nearly all the questions were about science followed by interest in learning, teaching, technology and student.

Here is a word cloud when I took out science

World Cloud for QFT Questions w/o Science - 1/24/12

Once again, no surprises here - teaching, learning, technology (actually that was kind of surprising and encouraging since we will be using a lot of technology in the class), students were part of many questions.

I should remind everyone that we will be talking mostly about science content in this class and not about how kids' learn science, although we will do some work with that.  But I am pretty happy with the outcomes of the QFT effort.

I would also like to remind people to blog about the QFT experience, especially with respect to how it might have changed you view of science as described in the first blog.  Did the process make you think more about the importance of questions in learning?  That is the essential question.  Please take some time to think about this.

I also talked about the higher-level critical thinking that has to go on with question development.  The first one was divergent thinking - looking outside of the box and creatively about an issue or concept.  That is what we were doing when I asked you to generate a lot of questions.  Second, there is convergent thinking; that is taking broad ideas and chiseling them down to a few more important ones.  When did we do this aspect of critical thinking?  Right, when we were prioritizing.  Lastly, the process involves metacognition - that is thinking about your thinking.  We kind of did this throughout the process.  Generating questions really makes you focus and THINK about concepts and issues.

Tomorrow in class we will be looking in more detail at science as practice frameworks - mainly the Activity Model for Inquiry and the Understanding Science diagram.  We will also be conducting a controlled experiment that has a content neutral focus.  More details tomorrow - it will be fun.

Have a good night - see you in the AM.

Matt