Devotional thought from Practice Resurrection: If we calculate the nature of the world by what we can manage or explain, we end up living in a very small world.
This is the context in which Peterson begins his exposition of Ephesians 1:3 - 14. In the Greek Ephesians 1:3 - 14 is one long sentence, about 200 words, and noted as "one of the most splendidly Jewish passages of praise and prayer in the New Testament ... a prayer of blessing to the one God for his mighty acts in creation and redemption."
Today I am meditating on Peterson's paraphrase of the first few verses of this "song of praise" ... How blessed is God! And what a blessing he is! He’s the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son. (from The Message, Eph. 1:3 - 6)
This morning I have been re-reading the chat we had last night about getting students to ask questions. Here is a LINK to the article that we read. And here is a COPY of our chat!
Last year, on day 1, we started with our first "I Notice, I Wonder" activity. I had made a chart of the seven functions we would study. Students wrote down their noticing and wondering. You can read about the activity HERE.
This year I am thinking about extending that activity into asking questions. The chart could be my QFocus. Students could work in small groups around large whiteboards. That way we can easily share our thoughts. I envision this activity occurring on Day 2 of our school year - when we are introducing the parent functions. It will be interesting to see what questions students develop and how we can apply their questions in our unit. One of the ideas discussed last night in our chat was inviting students to choose a question or two to answer for homework. That way students have ownership - of the questions and the homework. Hopefully that will be a win-win for them! I'm wondering also if I can include one or more of their own questions on our assessments during the unit of study!
Just now I was thinking about how we could hang our charts around the room - the noticing, wondering, questions ... but if we use the group whiteboards it's harder to save their work. Yes - I do take pictures but printing those out chart size isn't an option for me. We need to capture a summary of our work on "anchor charts" that we can refer to throughout the unit!
Before the summer is over, I plan to study more about students asking questions. At Right Question Institute (Twitter #QFT) there are free resources. My reading/thinking/planning pile is growing!
Last ... join us in our Twitter Chats ... we read one article a week and discuss them at 8 pm central time on Wednesday evenings! See Read Chat Reflect Learn and #EduRead on Twitter!
No comments:
Post a Comment