Acting Like a Scientist - Using Video to Generate Questions

Young children are naturally curious about their world and have a reputation for asking their parents an endless number of questions. At some point in their development, their willingness to ask questions usually stops and this usually occurs when they go to school. In school, students are asked questions by their teacher and when they are allowed to ask a question, it is usually addressed to the teacher about something they do not understand related to a taught learning objective. When students are given the ability to generate the questions for discussion, they act like scientists, a practice called for in the Next Generation Science Standards. In this talk, you will see how I used videos posted on the Internet as a forced connection that helped my students generate questions for discussion. You will see that some questions could be answered by other students and those that could not, became learning objectives for my science units.