Whilst I was responding to being ‘tagged’ in the 11 Questions meme by Nick Jackson, I started wondering how this principle of spreading questions and answers might be used in our classrooms. We’ve always solicited answers from students, whether whole-class, group or individual, and sought to employ good questioning techniques to encourage higher-order thinking in so doing. Increasingly, we’re beginning to recognise that it’s even more powerful if we empower students to ask their own questions, so we seek opportunities to do just that.
How about then, rather than 11 Questions which might become rather unwieldy, a 3 Question challenge? This could be on a topic you’re about to study, so the activity could reveal the current breadth of the students’ knowledge and understanding. Or it could be done at the close of a module as a simple assessment of how much the class has picked up. Maybe it could be an activity done at the start of the year to help to get to know a new class of students, or help them to learn about each other.
In practice, each student would ask three questions which would be distributed to three classmates, chosen by some fair system. This could be distributed via a blog if you have one, Google docs or email, or if you have access to none of these, pen and paper could also do the job. Each of the three recipients then has to answer the three questions in such a way that the sender can see the responses. After that first round, the initiator should then have three answers (which may of course be the same!) to each of their three questions. Since they’ve also acted as a recipient, they’ll also have seen and (hopefully) answered nine questions in total from three other people … again some of these may have been duplicates. By then drawing together and summarising the questions and answers of the whole class, it should be possible to get a good overview of areas which are strong and others which might need revisiting or addressing.
It sounds complex, but worth a try perhaps?
Practically In the pICTure 