“If your ears were square, could you hear?”
“Why do we only study war if we want peace?”
“Would you trust a robot to decide whether or not to drop an atomic bomb?”
These are questions that Jeff McClellan, director of National Sole, presented to a group gathered in California to discuss how to best lead initiatives to increase STEM education.
McClellan, an advocate of appreciative inquiry, has launched a system for helping students take charge of their own learning.
SOLE CLE has been training teachers and giving them big questions to research as part of a group. Currently, 1,304 people have created accounts in all continents, except Antartica.
Instructions on www.solecle.org explain, “In the Question Phase, the educator introduces the Big Question and shares some background or a short story around the question. It’s important to remember not to lead students to an answer or in any way reveal what they should learn. Big questions should lead to more questions, and don’t have a single right answers.”
McClellan’s presentation was part of a two-day training session in July sponsored by the STEM Learning Ecosystem Initiative. Northeast Ohio is one of 37 regions to have received funding from the STEM Funders Network to create an ecosystem.