What Did You Create Today?

In Will Richardson’s blog “What Did You Create Today?” http://weblogg-ed.com/2009/what-did-you-create-today/ he describes the learning environment he hopes his children will encounter at their new school. Richardson desires for his children to be instructed in a way that will evoke excitement about what happened at school that day. He wants his children to have a passion and be involved in thinking and doing activities. At the end of the day he desires for his children to be excited to share about the learning that took place in the classroom.
How refreshing this would be if children did get caught up in the activities of the classroom. I believe that many teachers spend a great deal of time planning and preparing activities that will involve exploration and discovery in hopes that students will desire to go deeper, hypothesize, and learn more. I think teachers can direct students to give more thought and be more involved in their education by asking questions that cause them to view education in a more participatory way. At the end of the class period, teachers could have the students journal answering a few of the following questions:
What did you learn or make today that was meaningful?
What surprised you, interested you? Why?
What did you teach others? What did you contribute to the class?
What unanswered questions are you struggling with? What will you do to try to find answers?
What do you want to know more about? How will you go about finding more information?
What did you love about today? (I think this may be one of the most important questions for it shifts the thinking from the negative to the positive. We all need to decide to focus on the positive of a situation and not be consumed by the negative.)
What made you laugh? (Sharing a moment of humor lifts one’s spirit and promotes good mental health.
Having the student then share their journal responses with their parents would be a great way for the parents to hear what went on during the school day from their child’s perspective.
I like that Richardson is not just asking the school to provide his children with good educational opportunities. He is assuming responsibility as a parent to follow up at home with questions that will ask his children to reflect on learning in a positive way, encouraging them to evaluate how they contributed to their educational experience and to pursue information to answer questions they still have.