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Is such a leading question bad? No. There are all sorts of good pedagogical reasons for using a question format to underscore knowledge or to call attention to a forgotten or overlooked idea.

an essential question is different from many of the questions teachers typically ask students in class. The most commonly asked question type is factual – a question that seeks “the” correct answer.

provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions;

when it helps students make sense of important but complicated ideas, knowledge, and know-how – findings that may be understood by experts, but not yet grasped or seen as valuable by the learner. In what ways does light act

What is an essential question? An essential question is – well, essential: important, vital, at the heart of the matter – the essence of the issue.

s there really a difference between a cultural generalization and a stereotype? 

Essential questions in this sense are those that point to the big ideas of a subject and to the frontiers of technical

naturally recurs, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects.Here is a variety of subject-area examples of such questions:

Why did that particular species/culture/person thrive and that other one barely survive or die? 

stimulates vital, on-going rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons;

districts need to start education efforts early,

“We need to start on Web usage education as soon as students are on the computer,”

Students as young as first and second grade can learn about passwords

secret except for a trusted adult.

acceptable use policy

“Internet safety nights” at schools for students and their parents,

dult education division, the district also conducts a more in-depth, three-hour class taught in a computer lab in which adults can take tours of MySpace, Facebook and other technologies as part of an Internet safety and security lesson.

Web 2.0 tools can be deployed

Digi Teen project,

groups of students collaborate with international peers

ecurity and etiquette, but also topics like ensuring equal access to technology in society regardless of income or disability

nternational teams to research trends

write a wiki entry

best way to

proper use of the Internet

employ the same sort of Web technologies being addressed, such as social networking Web sites,

mmersive, project based approach

important technological skills, introduces them to other cultures

empower teenagers and kids to understand digital citizenship

dvocates for good citizenship,

teachers to be truly effective in discussing Internet safety and security,

firsthand experience

Facebook or MySpace

“I don’t know how teachers can counsel kids eff ectively without some practical experience to fall back on,

This is often where electronic resources or the photocopy machine can actually be a detriment to the process.

Another alternative is having students prepare a written or oral summary of what they have learned about the process, or what content they have learned through the process.

Reviewing the Process is a critical element for helping students to understand research as a learning process and to develop their metacognitive abilities, for both 'thinking about thinking' and for 'thinking about feeling.'

When teachers pose questions about thinking and feeling and allow students to reflect upon their learning progress, students' personal growth is enhanced. Students' motivation to learn is also enhanced when such activities honour diverse learning styles and perspectives. Teachers should use a model of the research process on a consistent basis and explicitly call the students' attention to the model and to the particular stage at which they are working. Other useful strategies for reviewing the process include class discussions, journal writing, and making timelines as well as ongoing and retropective analyses of the data generated through such activities.

More time is needed in early stages of the process for exploration, for building content knowledge, for developing a personal interpretation or focus. This is not a waste of time but time well-invested in developing students' interest in and commitment to the topic being researched.

Teachers found that students taught using a research process approach, where the investigative work was integrated with the curriculum, found the students became "more creative, more positive, more independent" (Kühne, 1995, p.25). This was true for poorer students as well as for the stronger students, although the poorer students needed more individual attention during the process. Todd (1995) suggests that teachers and librarians think about their work with students as a conversation, an active interchange through which meaning is constructed. This interchange is discursive, adaptive, interactive and reflective. Students are encouraged to talk about their knowledge and teachers and librarians enter into this conversation with suggestions on how the student can move forward, see things from new perspective, make connections between previous and new knowledge, and see the patterns of their learning.

Teachers should be looking for topics that students will find personally compelling and that students can connect to the out-of-school world (Tallman, 1998).

a pathfinder approach, through the 1980s;

Teachers who have worked collaboratively with librarians were impressed by the creative and imaginative learning experiences that resulted from cooperative planning with teacher-librarians and thought teacher-librarians needed to be more assertive in inviting teachers to engage in cooperative planning (Sweeney, 1994).

understanding that students vary in the level of abstraction that they can handle

downsized,

now in the 1990s

problem-solving perspective.

Metacognition encompasses all the thinking that we do to evaluate our own mental processes and to plan for appropriate use of these processes to meet the demands of the situation. Metacognitive knowledge includes knowledge of person, task, and strategy, that is, knowledge of one's capacity to learn, about the nature of what is to be learned, and about actions that one can take to aid one's thinking (Flavell, 1979). Work on helping students to develop their abilities to think about, evaluate and monitor their feelings began much later, in the the 1970s.

Some of the worst abuses of research as a learning experience grow out of an emphasis on creating the product; with the focus on the final product, students may simply become more skillful in plagiarizing (McGregor, 1995).

Focus on Research: A Process Approach

Young or inexperienced researchers are more able to handle general knowledge topics where the emphasis is on fact-finding and organization of ideas.

The process model is theory-based and grounded in research from the fields of education and of library and information studies (LIS). From education, comes learning theory and from LIS, information seeking behavior theory. For example, from ed

Based on that policy, a program delivery model was developed called Focus on Learning

There

Junior high or middle school students are just beginning to be able to handle the abstract reasoning involved in focussing or narrowing a topic or for developing a position paper (Loerke, 1994)

Even teachers and librarians who are aware of the process models sometimes believe they are implementing their model but actually are leaving out the aspects that in fact are critical to the success of the model. For example, Holland (1994) found that teachers' implementation of the Focus on Research model was hampered by their limited understanding of the model, particularly in relation to the critical importance of Reviewing the Process. A statement in the Focus on Research document suggesting that a research activity need not include all stages and skills seemed to have been taken to mean that important aspects of the model such as involving students in Planning and in Reviewing the Process could be omitted entirely. Tastad and Collins (1997) also found that implementing process approaches is difficult in schools where the teaching practices and curriculum do not support a process or constructivist approach

teachers should help students to identify useful strategies such as omission or filtering (ignoring or selecting certain categories of information), generalizing or twigging (broadening or narrowing the topic), or asking for help.