Kindergarten

Everything we really needed to know. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

A while back I shared an interview I’d done with a middle school math teacher named Andre Sasser. If you remember middle school the way I do, you might understand the problem she faced.

At the end of her lessons, she’d ask, “Do you have any questions?” or even, “What are your questions?” and often be met with blank stares.

Then she got the idea to phrase things differently: “OK, give me two questions.”

This changed the calculus. (Sorry; most of us don’t go near calculus until long after middle school, but I couldn’t help myself.) Put differently, it was no longer her plaintive request, but instead, a bargain:

We’re not getting out of here until you’ve asked two questions.

Spoiler alert: She got her two questions.

Even better, 2 questions led to 3 and 4 and 20—pretty soon she wasn’t having a one-way conversation, but a real discussion. And that, she told me, led to real learning.

(She wrote about this on Twitter, which is how I heard about it.)