In this blog post, educator James Staton writes about how he values moments when he is wrong because they lead him to new lessons. Read more on his strategies to encourage all elementary students to explore their questions without fear of being wrong.
Teaching + Learning
This is a post from the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog.
Explore this clickable, interactive unit plan from history teacher Johnny Walker's classroom to understand how you might incorporate the QFT with primary sources multiple times throughout a unit. See how you can center student questions in your curriculum.
In this lesson snapshot, a high school ESL 4 class delves into factory farming, sustainability, and the food industry through Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. They use the QFT twice throughout the unit; once as a pre-reading exercise and later to unpack two juxtaposed primary sources images of farming then and now, armed with knowledge from the book.
The QFocus is often the most challenging part of designing a QFT lesson. It is also an essential piece to get right. Though it gets much easier with practice, there is always a bit of delicacy and iteration involved.
As a librarian, it’s in my wheelhouse to spend time searching for ‘what’s out there.’ The Library of
Congress is right there at the top of my go-to sites for anything historical, and especially for finding
primary sources to use with the Question Formulation Technique (QFT).