Chapter 6:
For many years, one of my favorite instructional tactics has been to give students a question, and in exactly the same moment, to provide students with the answer.
The question and answer could be as simple as this:
This strategy has always allowed me to ask questions that are far more important than the obvious. For example, “What pathways can you find that connect the question to the answer, and what can you learn from those pathways?” Then I provide space for the students to build connections between the question and the answer.
Notice that not all of the pathways depicted above can be generalized. One of them, in particular, is not defensible. That is not a setback. In fact, it provides a powerful opportunity for further learning, by exploring if the reasoning can be generalized.
If you have not yet had a chance to use this strategy, you might feel that providing the answer to the students entirely deflates the power of the question. However, something new happens in this case: Students become free to seek important connections between the question and the answer.
More importantly, after students identify connections between the question and the answer, they go back and look for other connections. In addition, students begin to compare and contrast those connections. The comparison of connections allows for deeper understanding.
Instead of this question dead-ending at the response twenty-five, it creates space for new observations. This primes the lesson to travel to somewhere far richer than simply finding a single “right” answer.
While using this strategy, I point to a Big Idea I had posted on the wall earlier in the year, and I remember how it was introduced.
“This is Big Idea 6: There may be many paths to the correct answer. I want you to know that when I see a question and an answer, I am only a little bit interested in the answer, especially if there is only one correct answer. Some people think finding the correct answer is the goal. Correct answers are important, but they are not very interesting. What is much, much more interesting is what we do to reach the answer. The pathway.
“The truth is that there may be many, many ways to the correct answer.
There may be many pathways.
“I am a little bit interested in the correct answer, but I am VERY interested in the pathways that lead to the answer. When we find one pathway, instead of stopping there, we can look for more pathways. We can explore those pathways. We can compare those pathways. And we can see where else they lead, because they may go to some places that are far more important than the correct answer, to places that none of us were ever expecting.
“So let’s start by understanding that, many times, there is not a single pathway we are all trying to follow. There may be many pathways to the correct answer. And looking for those pathways is important.”
In the quiet early morning, when I walk into the room and consider this Big Idea, I am reminded that I am only one learner among many. Although answers are important, I am compelled to validate the fact that there is rarely only one valid pathway to the correct answer. There are also invalid pathways, and even those can empower our learning.
I may enter a lesson with one pathway in mind. Yet while an obvious value exists in teaching a clear solution pathway to given situations, it is also valuable to acknowledge multiple pathways, and far more importantly, the pursuit of pathways.
The pursuit of multiple pathways to a solution, coupled with the focus on seeking connections between those pathways, empowers students to move beyond many of the original intentions of the lesson and into a discovery that makes the learning much more important.
Adequately personalizing a lesson for each and every student is nearly impossible when I try to contain the personalization within my own abilities. However, what is possible is empowering students to seek connections between the content and their lives.
A notable irony is that the more I try to control the personalization of the lessons, the more uniformity I create. I may even come to believe that if I rest the lesson on a topic to which I believe the students can relate, I have succeeded in personalizing the lesson. Yet if I empower the students to look for pathways, to hunt for connections, to seek how the learning intersects with their lives, they are much more likely to create meaningful personalization.