STARTSOLE

Big Questions can be make or break for a SOLE. A good question that students want to answer means that students will be excited and engaged. It basically removes the need to manage groups, because kids genuinely want to know the answer. However, that means the opposite is also true-- a bad question can mean kids are bored, uninterested, and basically makes a teacher’s day miserable. Luckily, it’s not too hard to come up with a really great question-- it just takes some reflection, and usually some input from your students. A big question needs to be open ended. If your question has a simple answer, students will figure it out in two minutes, plan their presentation, and then need to be managed for the majority of your class. Students need to be able to find multiple perspectives, to argue with each other, to come to a conclusion on their own. Anything simpler, and it’s an intro question, not a SOLE. A big question needs to be interesting. Tying questions into a student’s int...

I’m going to be very honest--if anyone other than Jeff McClellan had presented about SOLE the first time I saw it, I would have never tried it. Working in a CMSD Innovation school, I felt like we got a training every other week about some incredible educational program that was going to revolutionize our classroom. I had tried a few when I was a fresh-faced first year teacher, and quickly realized most of them were terrible-- a waste of time and energy, draining class time away that I could never recoup. Plus I was a Teach for America member, and so I was already inundated with teaching methods and programs to help me be a more effective, more innovative educator, and adding any more to the list just seemed like effort that I wasn’t willing to expend. I was, like most teachers, almost perpetually exhausted, and not very open to new things with very little guarantee. But Jeff was our former head of school, and our current one, Feowyn (Fe) MacKinnon Marshment, seemed on boar...