I have regular meetings with coaches who help me improve in personal and professional areas of my life. My coaches ask me questions about a variety of things from my personal/professional values, beliefs, and actions. They help me use my own responses to connect to my work and my relationships. It’s a powerful process that produces great results when I fully embrace it.
The students in your classroom can also achieve great results when they fully engage. One of the best ways to engage students in content is to ask questions. According to Lauren Porosoff, values activation questions help students connect content to their own lives. In the book Teach for Authentic Engagement, Porosoff shares the following eight example questions that can be used in the classroom to activate students (p.50):
- What about this unit makes you curious?
- What are you learning about in other places – home, classes, out-of-school life – that this unit relates to?
- What do you hope to have accomplished by the end of the unit?
- How is this unit an opportunity for you to be creative?
- Who might experience this unit differently from how you will?
- Why will your future self be glad you learned about this topic?
- How will your community benefit from you learning about this?
- Whose legacy does this work help you carry forward?
These are just a few questions that help students connect with the content and the classroom. I’m confident that you could add to this list many others. As you prepare for next week, think of ways that you can employ questions like these in your classroom. You and your students will be glad you did!
Phil Harrison Coaching 