In most classrooms, essential questions are everywhere. They are a popular way to focus the study and engage in the real endeavor of learning. I have seen a lot of essential questions; I have stayed up the night before I launch a new unit in my English class, making revisions in my head; I have helped teachers pick the perfect word or angle to express the question. It is routine, so what surprised me with this most recent TWIG session is that the essential question really got me stumped. I can usually pinpoint exactly what answer I have to the essential question. With this essential question, I wrote an initial answer, listened to the brilliant teachers in my TWIG break out room, and revised my answer. It helped me feel more confident in my answer, but still. So here is the question I can’t quite seem to get my thinking to hold still with: How can we most responsibly help students explore other perspectives to develop their own claims?
For this session, we followed a pretty common intellectual process: 1) We heard the question 2) We wrote out “gut claim” (the first response we feel in our gut) 3) We expanded our thinking by hearing others. In a classroom this might look like reading texts, but for us it was talking to the other educators in the Zoom session, which is the most delightful part of my Tuesday. After hearing others’ thoughts on the topic, we halted and revised our claims. Literally: stop and rewrite your former belief into where you are now. As an intellectual process it makes a lot of sense: start in a place, move through some new ideas, update your stance. What really gave me trouble with this question was that I don’t feel confident about checking any answer against the phrase “most responsibly”. (Will I always feel fourteen in the face of responsibility?) And more importantly how do we most responsibly help students explore other perspectives to develop their own claim?
Our investigation into argument has opened up a lot of fresh ideas and angles for me. I am constantly reminded that the process of writing an argument is dynamic and demanding. I really enjoy this idea from our conversation that helps me grapple with the responsibility of teaching the process to others: We should teach students that perhaps they can’t responsibly make a claim until they have done a certain amount of research. We shouldn’t ask them to take a stance until they have been in the conversation. But how much research is enough? When would we feel we know enough to make a claim? I can’t help but feel like the answer to that question is tied to the issues of civil discourse. Is making a premature claim contributing to a climate of disinformation? Take a moment and apply that idea to every political discussion. Should we make claims before we are deep into the conversation? Where I land on this is that we are constantly making claims in our head, constantly putting words to our best understanding of the truth. We naturally make the gut claim, though that doesn’t mean classrooms should necessarily formalize it. But the key is to continue to keep your stance humble and open. The key is to, as a teacher suggested, think of those first claims as hypotheses, as ideas that demand more investigation and research before it even nears become a truth.
At the end of every TWIG session, there is a one page explanation of a high-leverage teaching strategy that connects with the Essential Question. In this case, Maddie shared about a thinking tracker, which asks students to continually record how their thinking has changed. It formalizes the metacognition and the changing perspectives of the student. It’s brilliant, and what it helps us do is to think of gut claims as hypotheses. It helps us to approach each topic not with an unjustified confidence but with the curiosity of a scientist who knows that upcoming data will change this search for truth.
