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How Does Place Affect Value?
  This wiki is designed as a place to explore and work with critical thinking assessment ideas. We are including critical thinking questions, lessons and examples. It began as a wiki focused on critical thinking in math and grew through our discussions to include other academic facets. Please consider joining and adding ideas, projects, tasks, sites, etc.

-ACPS Elementary Critical Assessment Team

This wiki began with the name "Crack the Code" because we were looking at a task that involved place value and deciphering a code according to the position of the symbols. As we discussed that, the idea of value being attached to a place increased our understanding, helping us look at traditional teaching and learning differently. We began seeing more connections across disciplines.

As babies enter the world, they encounter a smorgasbord of sensory experiences--lights, touch, sounds, smells, colors, voices, shapes, faces, etc, and they begin to make sense of this cacophony by sorting and classifying, looking for patterns and recognizing similarities and differences in the sensory input around them. We, as humans, begin to make sense of the world around us through our observations and life experiences and our ability to interpret, make inferences and draw conclusions about those events //with thoughtful deliberation//.
 * Cracking the Code**:

Students are expected to make meaning of their life in multiple arenas each day in school.  "//Cracking the code// " of our life means to be able to understand it socially, emotionally, intellectually and physically. Students who understand the social code of situations can relate to different groups and situations appropriately and can hang with the "in crowd", hold their own with the nerds, joke and play with the jocks and generally adapt their behavior to the social mores of just about any group. Differences in ability to change social coding behaviors often are connected to a child's life experiences, since those help us build a repertoire of experiences against which we compare and contrast new ones.

Students who are successful at  //c////racking the code// of literacy--or numeracy--or any other academic area--usually have in common certain critical thinking skills. They look for and recognize patterns. They look for and find relationships among elements in their experiences. They are constantly comparing and contrasting, seeking similarities and differences, and making sense and meaning of their life experiences, usually with increasing sophistication as they have multiple experiences. Being able to "read" situations and people support us as we try to crack the code of our world.

Where we are often determines how we act. When we are in a place such as a funeral, quiet voices are often a requirement and thus have value to the people there. When we are on the school playground, though, we know we don't have to use those "inside voices." Thus, silence has little value on a playground. Our behavior has value depending on the place we are in--intelligent questions are valued in an intellectual discussion, but not so much in the middle of a basketball game running down the court. Jumping high to tap an emergency exit sign may win accolades with other basketball players, but clearly has no value-or it may have negative value- to the people who have to clean up and/or replace the broken sign that accidentally fell when struck. //Cracking the code// of our world means being able to determine //when// and //where// certain actions are appropriate.  //Cracking the code// means we can ascertain which behaviors have values in which places.

We can generalize this concept, that **value is attached to a position or place **, to many academic areas and this idea is what we explore in this wiki.

 