How Deep Can We Dig?

What is a fact? If it is something that can be proven and it is a smaller part of a concept, it can be many things. How small is small? It almost seems like one of those questions you get stuck on when you are a kid. “If I throw a baseball and it goes half the distance in 1 second, and half that distance in the next ½ second, and ½ of the half in the next ½ of ½ a second, and it keeps going and you can keep breaking it down, how does the ball ever get there?” The ball gets there because it always goes the full distance; it is just the budding mathematician that got stuck in a never ending line of fractions. In the same way, we need to pick an end point and stick to it. We only have some much time as teachers to allow students to delve into a topic, in the same way the ball only has so much time before it gets to the batter.

In elementary school we have a wide breath of topics to explore. Hopefully we can find way to integrate the topics so that we can have students use skills in one area, like reading, while learning about another content area.  Because of this wide variety of standards and concepts we need to teach, students are not going to get down to all the nitty-gritty facts in a concept. They should, however, get to some of them. Those little facts that are solid are the foundation so that they can understand more abstract things.

Inquiry allows students to have some say in the facts that they learn. There isn’t time for them all, and different facts can help build up the same concept.  When students are given, or helped to form their own high quality questions that are investigable, they can take some control. For instance, when we look at why people came to the colonies, there are many reasons, many small facts that add up to why. They came for religious freedom. Religious freedom alone looked different for each group. Puritans wanted the freedom to be Puritans, but they were not interested in any other religions being free. Quakers, on the other hand, had more of a worship-as-you-please attitude. Others came for the chance at land, or a fresh start from the poor house.  Yet other came for the chance to be rich. That makes that question of why people were will to leave England for a new unsettled world a great one for students to look at in a deeper way.

Now that same concept of Europeans had motivation to move to North America could be broken down into smaller concepts. You could look at why they wanted to move to Massachusetts and be Puritan.  There are so many facts in just that concept. That could be looked at in a tighter lens still and we could look at, was a strict religious society a successful one? Or we could investigate who wanted to come live in Puritan Massachusetts?

As teachers we need to think about this breadth and depth as we prepare lessons and investigations. This will help us and our students on track.