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"It seems only fitting to explore the role of questions in education by asking questions about the process of doing so. I propose that we start with the customary way of framing this topic and then proceed to questions that are deeper and potentially more subversive of traditional schooling. 1. WHICH QUESTIONS? To begin, let's consider what we might ask our students. The least interesting questions are those with straightforward factual answers. That's why a number of writers have encouraged the use of questions described variously as "true" (Wolf, 1987), "essential" (Simon, 2002), "generative" (Perkins, 1992; Perrone, 1998), "guiding" (Traver, 1998), or "fertile" (Harpaz & Lefstein, 2000). What the best of these share is that they're open-ended. Sometimes, in fact, no definitive right answer can be found at all. And even when there is one - or at least when there is reason to prefer some responses to others - the answer isn't obvious and can't be summarized in a sentence. Why is it so hard to find a cure for cancer? Do numbers ever end? Why do people lie? Why did we invade Vietnam? Grappling with meaty questions like these (which were among those generated by a class in Plainview, NY) is a real project . . . literally. A question-based approach to teaching tends to shade into learning that is problem- (Delisle, 1997) and project-based (Kilpatrick, 1918; Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Wolk, 1998). Intellectual proficiency is strengthened as students figure out how to do justice to a rich question. As they investigate and come to understand important ideas more fully, new questions arise along with better ways of asking them, and the learning spirals upwards. Guiding students through this process is not a technique that can be stapled onto our existing pedagogy, nor is it something that teachers can be trained to master during an in-service day. What's required is a continual focus on creating a classroom that is about thinking rather

"Call it counterintuitive clickbait if you must, but Forbes' Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry made an intriguing argument when he granted the title of "Language of the Future" to French, of all tongues. "French isn't mostly spoken by French people and hasn't been for a long time now," he admits," but "the language is growing fast, and growing in the fastest-growing areas of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. The latest projection is that French will be spoken by 750 million people by 2050. One study "even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin." I don't know about you, but I can never believe in any wave of the future without a traceable past. But the French language has one, of course, and a long and storied one at that. You see it visualized in the information graphic above (also available in suitable-for-framing prints!) created by Minna Sundberg, author of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent. "When linguists talk about the historical relationship between languages, they use a tree metaphor," writes Mental Floss' Arika Okrent. "An ancient source (say, Indo-European) has various branches (e.g., Romance, Germanic), which themselves have branches (West Germanic, North Germanic), which feed into specific languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian)." Sundberg takes this tree metaphor to a delightfully lavish extreme, tracing, say, how Indo-European linguistic roots sprouted a variety of modern-day living languages including Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Italian - and, of course, our Language of the Future. The size of the branches and bunches of leaves represent the number of speakers of each language at different times: the likes of English and Spanish have sprouted into mighty vegetative clusters, while others, like, Swedish, Dutch, and Punjabi, assert a more local dominance over their own, separately grown regional branches. Will French's now-modest leave

"This comic is a timeline on how the temperature has changed from 20,000 BCE (Before Common Era) to the present day (2016), with three predictions for the rest of the 21st century depending on what actions are taken (or not taken) to stop CO₂ emission. This comic is a direct, but much more thorough, follow up on the previous global warming comic: 1379: 4.5 Degrees. By having readers scroll through millennia of slow-paced natural changes, Randall uses the comic to confront the the rapid temperature rise in the recent years. Over the past 100 years, human action has produced a large amount of CO₂ emissions, which have caused a rise in average global temperature through the greenhouse effect. This is called global warming and is part of a climate change, a subject that has become a recurrent subject on xkcd. There are still many people who claim that this is not happening, or at least that it is not caused by any human actions, called climate change deniers. One argument of theirs is that global warming is happening for natural causes, summarized with the phrase "temperature has changed before". "

"El texto argumentativo es una modalidad discursiva que tiene como finalidad defender mediante argumentos una idea o tesis. A la hora de redactar un texto argumentativo muchos alumnos muestran enormes dificultades para su redacción al enfrentarse a una hoja en blanco. El motivo por el cual les cuesta tanto redactar este tipo de textos es que no parten de una estructura previa que les permita la redacción de un texto escrito, independientemente de la tesis que se quiera argumentar. Es por ello que este artículo tiene la intención de enseñaros a redactar un texto argumentativo desde el principio para que podáis aplicarlo posteriormente sin tener en cuenta la tesis que vayáis a defender. Si conseguimos que previamente a la redacción el alumno tenga por escrito un guión previo muy definido, la redacción será mucho más fácil. En este sentido el profesor es importante que no sólo valore el texto argumentativo, sino también el borrador o plantilla elaborada por el alumno."

"La asertividad consiste en encontrar el equilibrio entre la agresividad y la pasividad. La asertividad es una de las claves para alcanzar la felicidad, porque una persona asertiva evita la agresividad verbal o física a la hora de defender una idea y el sometimiento a la opinión de los demás por defecto. La persona asertiva presenta una mayor capacidad para ser feliz porque defiende sus ideas de tal manera que siempre sale reforzada en su autoestima. La asertividad es un rasgo que denota madurez, firmeza y convicción. Pero, ¿cómo se adquiere la asertividad? ¿Cómo puedes fomentar la asertividad entre tus alumnos para que mejoren su autoestima y su autoconcepto? Pues bien, en el artículo de hoy te daré 10 consejos muy sencillos para fomentar la asertividad entre tus alumnos. ¿Me acompañas? Asertividad Imagen extraída de Shutterstock 10 Consejos para trabajar la asertividad entre tus alumnos. 1. NO. Hay que aprender a decir que no. Hay que enseñar a los alumnos la importancia de poder decir no en determinados contextos o cuando crean que realmente deben negarse ante una acción u opinión, por ejemplo. Saber decir no es algo vital en la vida de cualquier persona y, por supuesto, en la vida de tus alumnos, porque tiene una gran función reparadora y hace aumentar su seguridad. 2. YO. La persona con asertividad, al tener mucha confianza en sí misma, es capaz de expresarse en todo momento con la primera persona del singular. Fíjate en la diferencia de estos dos mensajes con un mismo contenido pero dichos de manera muy diferente: Este trabajo es muy pesado. Estoy muy cansado. Necesito descansar un instante (frase asertiva en 1ª persona) 3. BREVEDAD. Cuando me refiero a frases breves, quiero que entiendas la importancia de ser conciso a la hora de manifestar una opinión o postura. Las persona asertiva suele ser directa y muy breve, porque no tiene la necesidad de dar grandes rodeos para decir lo que piensa o lo que quiere. La persona asertiva