• Students as citizens
• The lesson’s teaching challenges
• What makes cooperative learning successful
• The value of constructivist learning
• How to get started
• How you know when you’ve done a good job
• Her background

Kristen Borges: I always believe that teachers should be able to just jump in and try it. Once you experience it, you can go back and figure out what worked and what didn’t work and what needs to be changed. But if there is some hesitation on turning that power over to the students, perhaps a teacher might want to start on a smaller scale. You have to let go of a lot when you have this kind of process in your classroom. One thing that is a challenge sometimes is losing that control where you as the teacher are responsible for every single minute in the hour.

You can start on a small scale by having weekly discussions or weekly activities where students get used to being responsible for their own learning. I like posing some kind of essential question or controversial question for [students] to attack. I try to do that with all of the units that I teach, so students start pretty early in my class knowing that there is no one direct answer to these types of questions.

The students get more experienced as you start introducing them to working more with cooperative groups or performing some smaller skit or taking a passage out of a book and turning it into some kind of performance before you attack a huge simulation.