Current Events - Inquiring Like a Professional

Current Events: Inquiring Like a Professional evolved from the desire to combine critical thinking skills with current events and career exploration. Individual choice keeps students interested, and the teacher's discretionary pick of current event keeps the topic relevant to a wide variety of classrooms and subjects.

A product of Science Class Online, this lesson could be used in social studies, language arts, or math courses as well as in science. It is especially useful as a break from standard content-driven lessons; this is a cooperative, creative activity that inspires students to think of an interesting current event from multiple perspectives. Not a 'pull off the shelf and give the kids a worksheet', the lesson plan does require critical and creative thinking by the teacher. To see a full description of how I implemented this lesson in my own 8th grade science classroom, please go here: http://sciclassonline.com/wp/category/gifted-and-talented-education/

This lesson is designed for the teacher experienced teaching with the GATE elements of depth and complexity developed by Dr. Sandra Kaplan (U.S.C.), as well as Dr. Benjamin Blooms' taxonomy and Dr. Arthur Costa's levels of questioning, although background reading materials and web links are suggested for those unfamiliar with these works.

The lesson provides a creative teacher with a motivating, open-ended touchstone for previously taught elements of depth and complexity, Costa's levels, and Bloom's higher-level thinking questions, centered around a current event from the viewpoint of a chosen discipline.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.