Richard D. Solomon's Blog on Mentoring Jewish Students and Teachers

Our hope is that this blog will become a forum in which people can exchange ideas on how to recruit, develop and retain exceptional Jewish educators through mentoring and e-mentoring students, teaching candidates, and teachers in our day and supplemental schools. The present focus of this blog is to empower Jewish teachers, administrators, teacher trainers, consultants, and staff developers to integrate web technology (i.e. web tools and apps) into their teaching and teacher training.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Instructional Method to Empower Students to Create Their Own Questions for Small Group and Whole Class Discussion: Think-Trix (Lyman, 1987)

When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices. Accordingly our mentees should know about instructional methods to empower students to generate their own questions. One of those methods is the Think-Trix of * Frank Lyman(1987).

Frank Lyman, Ph.D. created the Think-Trix visual cues as a device to prompt students to create their own questions for classroom discussion and inquiry. These visual cues are designed to empower students to ask seven different types of questions. On the top of this post is a chart depicting the seven visual Think-Trix cues.

*Lyman, F. (1987) The Think Trix: A Classroom Tool for Thinking in Response to Reading. In Issues and Practices. A Yearbook of the State of Maryland International Reading Association Council. 4, 15-18.

On the next post we will share a chart showing sample questions applying Frank Lyman’s Think-Trix.