1000 Things That Matter

When I saw the site 1000 Things That Mat­ter this morn­ing, my first thought was about what I’d post there. I decided to give it a cou­ple of days and pon­der what really mat­ters before putting in my two cents.

Then I con­sid­ered how I might use this with my gifted stu­dents. The obvi­ous appli­ca­tion would be to have stu­dents write ideas they’d post there. Noth­ing wrong with that, of course, and I could even have the stu­dents post their ideas to the site. But I want to stretch my gifted stu­dents, and I’m sure that if I just put this ques­tion to them as is, they’d choose the first things that came to their minds. I’d rather take them into higher lev­els of analy­sis and evaluation.

One of the inter­est­ing things about the site is that the things peo­ple are shar­ing are avail­able as they are posted. I think it would be rather enlight­en­ing to have stu­dents do a 3-​​phase process with this site:

1. First, answer the ques­tion indi­vid­u­ally: If you had to tell what mat­ters to you in two sen­tences, what would you say?
2. Then, look at a sam­pling (or per­haps all) of the ideas that have been shared already. Con­sider some of these questions:
   • What do you notice?
   • Are there any patterns?
   • Are there any com­mon themes that keep com­ing back?
   • Is there any­thing that seems to be missing?
   • Is there any­thing surprising?
   • What can you tell me about the peo­ple who are sub­mit­ting their ideas?
3. Now look at what you wrote orig­i­nally. Would you change it? How? Why?

I encour­age you to try this process your­self and con­tribute a com­ment to the site. I’d also be inter­ested in what other ideas you have for using 1000 Things That Mat­ter with stu­dents. Share your ideas here in the comments.