How Many Gargoyles are on Notre Dame Cathedral or why DID the Chicken Cross the Road?

     How many Gargoyles are on the Cathedral at Notre Dame?  I suppose if I wanted to be the center of attention at the holiday office party or were a contestant on Are You Smarter Than a 5^th Grader, then I might need this informational tidbit but according to author Jamie McKenzie on From Now On, The Educational Technology Journal, these are the kinds of meaningless questions that educators typically ask students to research when exploring with technology. McKenzie continues to insist that there is a difference between knowledge and understanding or insight. If we want our students to develop higher order thinking skills then we, as educators must ask them to search for the answers to essential questions. Rather than just engaging our students in a search for random information to accumulate shouldn’t we ask them to deliberate on why and how and what if?  Once they ponder these questions what kind of understanding can they build and what would that look like if you could actually map the thought patterns in the brain?

     When it comes to actual content, these essential questions should be at the center of any network or visual organizer. Thoughts can become actual words and pictures that support the construction of cognition. I don’t necessarily want my students to simply tell me the structure of DNA.   I want them to use their knowledge of that structure to infer what could happen to the traits of organisms if that structure would change and suggest what implications there could be for a species that has undergone those mutations. Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn & Malenoski suggest that if students are going to synthesize new meaning from what they have found then they must be able to sift and weigh all the accumulated bits of information in order to glean out the most important and supportive ideas. Learning to summarize is much like writing a traditional newspaper article. Who, what, where, when, why and how are merely guides to get the complete scoop and now even note taking and brain storming have entered the digital age with access to software that can assist students in this task. If we are to believe wiki answers then we could discover that there are 5000 Gargoyles on the Cathedral of Notre Dame but what was more enlightening for me as a learner was that Gargoyles were actually architectural rain gutters that had different spiritual and social meanings. Surely that is more essential than a simple head count.

     However, I still do not know exactly why the chicken actually crossed the road even though a Google search yields over three million hits in less than .15 seconds. That’s going to be a BIGGGGG graphic organizer. Oh the meaning we can construct.