Week 8: Are They Thinking?

I read an interesting blog post this week from Eric Sheninger, a principal and technology guru. His premise is for teachers to ask themselves two questions: (1) Are the students thinking?; (2) Are the students applying their thinking? (Here is the blog post: http://esheninger.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-two-most-important-questions-to-ask.html)

These questions plague me when I think about my use of technology and blended learning. Because I don't work in a district that is 1:1, and my students aren't all on the same playing field with the technology they bring, I constantly feel like I'm "doing" technology instead of "integrating" technology. So Sheninger's questions helped me think this week about the ways I'm asking my students to use the technology we have to actually show the thinking and learning from class.

One way I did this with my F2F ELA students was to use a shared Google Slides so we could annotate a poem together. I started out with only five slides --the number of groups in class--and their job was to pick out figurative language and sensory details that helped them construct meaning from the poem. They seemed to like this activity, and I liked that they could see similarities in how to annotate the poem. But did they "think"? I'm not sure -- the assignment was creative, I guess, but it was more of a modification of annotation (on the SAMR scale).

Sheninger shares this image on the blog post:

http://esheninger.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-two-most-important-questions-to-ask.html

I'm thinking that maybe I didn't correlate Blooms' at a high enough level, and my students were still in the understanding or applying stage of learning. This is one of the problems I have in instructional design, ensuring that the thinking I want students to do actually increases rather than staying at the lower levels.