Convergent - Understanding how to make sense of facts and examples is vital for students. Using the tools available such as explaining, interpreting, and summarizing can help students become more confident in their skills.

Metacognition - This is the ability to think about one's learning and thinking processes. Being able to understand what one has learned is an important aspect of metacognition. Limited metacognition can lead to ineffective time management and overconfidence in one's skills.

QFT - This technique is an extremely helpful tool for teachers to help foster students' abilities to create their own questions and improve them. The first step is to create a question focus. This focus is what students will work on getting to while creating their questions. Next students will work to create their questions. The teacher can help guide the questions to better fit the question focus. Then students will work on improving their questions both closed and open-ended. The final step is to reflect on the content and process.

2) The rules for producing questions are as follows: ask as many questions as you can, do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any question, write down every question exactly as it is stated, and change any statement into a question. Rules for producing questions give shape and structure to an open-ended thinking process and reduce students' anxiety when they undertake to respond to your questions. When it comes to rule one asking questions gets the ball rolling and starts the process. Knowing what questions to ask is important and rule one helps with this. A challenge that it presents is that students may say that it is the teacher's job to come up with questions and they would be correct in a formal lesson but in this case, they will create the lesson. Rule two takes away the right to discuss the questions. Stopping to discuss closes the chance to create new ideas. This can be challenging as students will want to discuss the questions. Rule three is important as we want to subconsciously change how questions are worded but we cannot as it honors and validates the question. Rule four is important because we are focusing on asking questions and statements do not align with this. It can be difficult as some statements do not seem to be easily turned into questions. These rules force students to think outside the box and work together. Without stopping to discuss more options and ideas become available.

1. Marlene Schoeneck was an amazing guest speaker and I was able to learn a lot from her. Using QFT in a classroom can be very powerful. It is a strategy that allows students to do the majority of the work and take their education into their own hands. In my own classroom instruction I want to include QFT a lot. It was fun to be able to explore a topic with no worries about judgement. Everyone questions are written down which can help more students become engaged. QFT is something that can be used in a variety of content areas. Some examples would be in history, science, and english. All of these content areas contain some time where free thinking and exploration can help students understand better. For english this can be done for genres or hypothesis before reading a book. For science it can be used with different topics or reactions. For history, this can be done historical events.

   
   

2. When it comes to engaging students in divergent thinking there are many different impacts. Students will be able to hear each other ideas. THey can figure our how each other think as well. Another thing that can happen with divergent thinking is being able to see what routes students will take when researching. Even if students have the same topic they will end up in different directions. Finally students get the chance to create their own questions This allows them to have a sense of ownership. 

   
   

3. When it comes to close-ended questions there are several different advantages and disadvantages. For advantages they are quick, they get you clear information right away, and you get a specific answer. For disadvantages they don’t give you much information, they close off discussion, you don’t learn what you really want to know, and you may need to know more or you want more information but all you got was a one-worded answer.

   
   

4. Much like close-ended questions, open-ended questions also have their own advantages and and disadvantages. For advantages you get more information, find out more, get a fuller explanation, it will get you more information, you get to hear what the other person is thinking, and you might get an explanation that helps you understand more. For disadvantages you may get too much information, get the runaround, may not get the information you need, don’t understand everything being told to you, can be more confused, and it can be too long.