Fostering Student Questions: Strategies for Inquiry-Based Learning 1. The Question Formulation Technique The Question Formulation Technique offers a starting place to teach students how to construct questions that meet their needs. The QFT is a process for coaching students on the value and pitfalls of closed-ended and open-ended questions, including where and how to use them. Use the QFT as a foundation for the other protocols shared, which can lead to rich learning experiences. 2. One challenge to generating substantive questions and ideas is getting every student's voice heard. Post a topic as a statement starter or a question on chart paper for small groups. Traditionally, the teacher collects the results at the end to use as data for later activities based on the students' contributions. 3. One challenge with reading articles or other pieces of writing is getting students to read for meaning and make connections beyond summary. Divide students into groups of 2-4. 4. It's amazing what students come up with when the teacher is silent. No Time to Wait
The Great Question Press Why should teachers nurture potent questioning skills and behaviors? As a practical matter, students need to be able to read between the lines, infer meaning, draw conclusions from disparate clues and avoid the traps of presumptive intelligence, bias and predisposition. They need these thinking skills to score well on increasingly tough school tests, but more importantly, they need these skills to score well on the increasingly baffling tests of life . . . how to vote? how to work? how to love? how to honor? Drill and practice combined with highly scripted lessons stressing patterns and prescriptions amount to mental robbery - setting low standards for disadvantaged students so they end up incapable of thought or success on demanding tests. This approach contributes to high dropout and attrition rates - early school departures and millions of children left behind.
The Questioning Toolkit - Revised The first version of the Questioning Toolkit was published in November of 1997. Since then there has been substantial revision of its major question types and how they may function as an interwoven system. This article takes the model quite a few steps further, explaining more about each type of question and how it might support the overall investigative process in combination with the other types. photo ©istockphoto.com Section One - Orchestration Most complicated issues and challenges require the researcher to apply quite a few different types of questions when building an answer. Orchestration is the key concept added to the model since its first version. orchestrate: To combine and adapt in order to attain a particular effect: arrange, blend, coordinate, harmonize, integrate, synthesize, unify. As the researcher moves beyond mere gathering to discovering and inventing new meanings, the complexity and the challenge of effective orchestration grows dramatically. --- Essential Questions ---
Reflecting on reflection This is hardly wasting time. It is this kind of sitting that allows the mind to wander, to wonder and to speculate. Sven Birkert calls this process "resonance" in The Gutenberg Elegies: Resonance—there is no wisdom without it. Incubation We are looking for something. Making our way toward inspiration and illumination - the "Aha!" This incubation process usually thrives on reverie and musing - mood states within which the subconscious works its best magic. Reverie Reverie is the dream state during which incubation, percolation and fermentation may take place. daydream, daydreaming, trance, musing; inattention, inattentiveness, woolgathering, preoccupation, absorption, abstraction, lack of concentration Reflecting on a Painting, a Poem, a Photograph or an Essay When we ask students to look past the surface to consider deeper meanings and possibilities, we are asking them to reflect with due deliberation. Here are some examples that require such thought: Order the print version by clicking below.
Embracing Complexity Wondering, Pondering, Wandering and Considering For the young to make their own meanings, they need to be able to shift back and forth across the four operations of wondering, pondering, wandering and considering. Each has its own role and its own time, but sometimes they may operate concurrently. Under the old topical approach to school research, students were asked to do little more than scoop and smush. In what ways was the life remarkable? Such questions of import quoted from the Biography Maker cannot be answered with simple scooping and smushing. Wandering and Stumbling to Meaning When students have experienced only the scooping and smushing model, they have little grasp of what it means to explore a question of import. Questions of import, being puzzles or mysteries, almost always require that the researcher muck around a bit, digging into the raw information like a detective seeking clues. Source It takes some wandering about to learn about these people. 1.
FILLING THE TOOL BOX The above ads are generated by Google and FNO does not endorse the products displayed in any manner. From Now On The Educational Technology Journal Classroom Strategies to Engender Student Questioning © 1986 by Jamie McKenzie, Ed.D. and Hilarie Bryce Davis, Ed.D. all rights reserved. Most of the strategies described below have been developed and tested by teachers in Princeton, Madison and elsewhere. As one of the primary goals of education is to develop autonomous but interdependent thinkers, students deserve frequent opportunities to shape and direct classroom inquiry. 1) Beginning A New Unit (K-12) If a class is about to spend several days or weeks studying a particular topic or concept, traditional practice and unit design gives the teacher primary responsibility for identifying the key questions and the key answers. Try starting a new unit by asking your class to think of questions that could be asked about the topic; "What questions should we ask about the Civil War? 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
7 Ways to Inspire Divergent Thinking in the Classroom The world is unpredictable. The corporate ladder is now a maze, which means our students will need to think divergently. In this article, we explore how to integrate divergent thinking into our everyday classroom practices. If you enjoy this blog but you’d like to listen to it on the go, just click on the audio below or subscribe via iTunes/Apple Podcasts (ideal for iOS users) or Google Play and Stitcher (ideal for Android users). When I was a kid, my twin brother and I loved watching American Gladiators. It was epic. We spent hours playing our game, adding slight variations on it and eventually hacking the rules to make it less and less like American Gladiators and more and more like The Spencer Twin Gladiators. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, something powerful was happening when we invented our American Gladiators game. In the past, students could depend on a simple formula. In the future, students will need to be nimble. #1: Use multiple types of divergent thinking.
Many, Many Examples Of Essential Questions by Terry Heick Essential questions are, as Grant Wiggins defined, ‘essential’ in the sense of signaling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries.” These are grapple-worthy, substantive questions that not only require wrestling with, but are worth wrestling with–that could lead students to some critical insight in a 40/40/40-rule sense of the term. I collected the following set of questions through the course of creating units of study, most of them from the Greece Central School District in New York. In revisiting them recently, I noticed that quite a few of them were closed/yes or no questions, so I went back and revised some of them, and added a few new ones, something I’ll try to do from time to time. Or maybe I’ll make a separate page for them entirely. See also 8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions Many, Many Examples Of Essential Questions Decisions, Actions, and Consequences What is the relationship between decisions and consequences? Social Justice Creation
Why Understanding These Four Types of Mistakes Can Help Us Learn by Eduardo Briceño This article was first published in the Mindset Works newsletter. We can deepen our own and our students’ understanding of mistakes, which are not all created equal, and are not always desirable. Here are two quotes about mistakes that I like and use, but that can also lead to confusion if we don’t further clarify what we mean: “A life spent making mistakes is not only most honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing” – George Bernard Shaw “It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose which it truly has.” – Maria Montessori These constructive quotes communicate that mistakes are desirable, which is a positive message and part of what we want students to learn. Types of mistakes The stretch mistakes Stretch mistakes happen when we’re working to expand our current abilities. Stretch mistakes are positive. We want to make stretch mistakes! The aha-moment mistakes
The importance of surprise There should be surprise, delight or even discomfort as one explores. True inquiry involves discovery. The task at hand should awaken curiosity and take the student on an adventure. Mere topical research requires little more than gathering and is often sleep inducing. It is up to the teacher to frame research projects around questions of import and tasks that require fresh thinking, problem-solving and imagination. The following checklist was designed to help teachers determine whether their research assignments are likely to produce surprise, awaken curiosity and challenge students at the highest possible levels. to read the full explanation. Image courtesy of Fighting-Wolf-Fist on Deviant Art 1. Paul Simon said it so well when he sang in Kodachrome: When I think back On all the crap I learned in high school It's a wonder I can think at all Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew would win little attention or audience if the solutions to their mysteries were lying in plain sight. 4. 5. 7. 8. 9.
Bringing Inquiry-Based Learning Into Your Class In the shallow end of the Types of Student Inquiry pool, Structured Inquiry gives the teacher control of the essential question, the starting point—for example, “What defines a culture?” or “What is the importance of the scientific method?” These questions are not answered in a single lesson and do not have a single answer, and, in fact, our understanding of an essential question may change over time as we research it. In Structured Inquiry, the teacher also controls specific learning activities, the resources students will use to create understanding, and the summative assessment learners will complete to demonstrate their understanding. In Controlled Inquiry, the teacher provides several essential questions. How Are the Types of Student Inquiry Helpful? Inquiry is most successful when strongly scaffolded. This structure allows us to successfully address the curriculum and the “must know” content and skills of each discipline, grade level, and course. Second, think big and start small.
Race and the Literary Canon “OK,” I say to my students, “this is a book written 57 years ago about events that would have happened 84 years ago. Are the things being discussed here still relevant today? Why or why not?” My students pause. We’ve just finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel their parents probably read as well at some point. However, as we’ve read and researched, my students have come to realize that the story of Tom Robinson and his unfair persecution in Maycomb, Alabama, is still very relevant. There are problems with teaching only classics—the stories are overwhelmingly told from a white and/or male perspective, and more needs to be done to diversify that. But some of us must teach the classic middle and high school texts, and some of us really enjoy teaching them. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee’s book has been discussed quite a bit lately, and it’s no surprise that it’s still as controversial and important a read as it was when it came out. Discuss the white savior trope.
Anticipation Guides Classroom Strategies Download a Graphic Organizer Blank Anticipation Guide Word Doc (120 KB)PDF (125 KB) Background An Anticipation Guide is a strategy that is used before reading to activate students' prior knowledge and build curiosity about a new topic. Benefits Anticipation Guides are loved by teachers because of their ability to engage all students in the exploration of new information by challenging them to critically think about what they know or think they know about a topic. Create the strategy There are several ways to construct an anticipation guide for middle and high school students. Identify the major ideas presented in the reading.Consider what beliefs your students are likely to have about the topic.Write general statements that challenge your students' beliefs.Require students to respond to the statements with either a positive or negative response. Use the strategy Have students complete the anticipation guide before reading. References
20 Strategies for Motivating Reluctant Learners Kathy Perez has decades of experience as a classroom educator, with training in special education and teaching English language learners. She also has a dynamic style. Sitting through her workshop presentation was like being a student in her classroom. Perez says when students are engaged, predicting answers, talking with one another and sharing with the class in ways that follow safe routines and practices, they not only achieve more but they also act out less. “If we don’t have their attention, what’s the point?” She’s a big proponent of brain breaks and getting kids moving around frequently during the day. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. NED’s GREAT EIGHT I feel OKIt mattersIt’s activeIt stretches meI have a coachI have to use itI think back on itI plan my next steps 9. Build a safe environmentRecognize diversity in the classroomAssessment must be formative, authentic and ongoingInstructional strategies should be a palette of opportunitiesNew models 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.