Vol 2|No 5|May|2006
This month's issue offers two articles.
1. "What is a thinker?" By Jamie McKenzie
http://questioning.org/may06/thinker.html
Schools are expected to develop thinkers. But just what is a thinker?
And what must we do to grow more of them?
We have enough bricks in the wall. We have a surfeit of fools.
A healthy society needs thinkers to protect us from plastic thinking,
from toxic planning and from disasters like the man made disaster
following the natural disaster named Katrina.
A thinker asks good questions and figures things out with an
independent spirit.
A thinker rarely cuts and pastes or makes simple copies, and never
steals or plagiarizes.
(Continued at http://questioning.org/may06/thinker.html)
2. "Learning Questioning" By Jamie McKenzie
http://questioning.org/may06/learn2q.html
This article first appeared as Chapter Seven in Jamie McKenzie's book,
Learning to Question to Wonder to Learn.
What skills should accompany the attitudes outlined in the previous
chapter?
A hunger for answers amounts to little if we cannot equip the young
with the tools to dig, delve and divine the truth. This is not a
matter of divining rods or magic wands - rather an array of
questioning and thinking strategies that make exploration, discovery
and invention possible.
This chapter reviews more than a dozen strategies that are crucial
but all too often neglected by schooling and programs that profess to
teach thinking.
1. Orchestration
Chief among the strategies in the diagram above would be the smart
selection and orchestration of question types - an understanding of
when each question type should be applied to the challenge at hand.
Thinkers cannot rely upon recipes, scripts or prescribed patterns.
They must often make up their approach as they proceed. Each
important quest or investigation requires customization and
adaptation. The thought process, if it could be captured visually,
might appear like a pinball bouncing from point to point, as the mind
darts and weaves from here to there, trying first one and then
another tack. Or the thought process might resemble a flock of sloops
cutting back and forth across the wind. Or sometimes it might look
more like a fire- fireworks display, a shooting star, a cat chasing
its tail or a dust devil, spinning and spinning intently across
apparently barren earth.
(Continued at http://questioning.org/may06/learn2q.html)
Jamie McKenzie
Editor, From Now On - The Educational Technology Journal
http://fno.org
Editor, The Question Mark
http://questioning.org
mckenzie@fno.org
360-647-8759
500 15th Street
Bellingham, WA 98225
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