Three little questions

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo by Cali4beach: http://flickr.com/photos/cali4beach/8104593909/

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?

License to Ask

Questions by Oberazzi
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

One message which came through strongly from the INSET session I mentioned in the last post was how much we need to stimulate a sense of curiosity by prodding, encouraging and cajoling students into asking questions … but asking the right questions and in the right ways. The significance of this in enhancing learning was emphasised just a day later when this Mind/Shift article was posted – For Students, Why the Question is More Important Than the Answer

Coming up with the right question involves vigorously thinking through the problem, investigating it from various angles, turning closed questions into open-ended ones and prioritizing which are the most important questions to get at the heart of the matter.

The article highlights that we need to give the students ‘license to ask’ questions and to enable this we should:

• provide sufficient time for them to think through what they want to ask
• enable it to be acceptable for some to ask many questions whilst others only come up with a few … but that it’s important for everyone to contribute
• not judge answers
• note each question as stated.

Now that all sounds like a rather time-consuming exercise if undertaken in class time. Nevertheless if it’s important enough we’ll make the time … though perhaps can’t afford to be so fastidious on a regular basis. Perhaps then ICT can offer an alternative way?

Typecast is an online application specifically geared towards facilitating student questions. The principle is that you pose a stimulus idea about which students could ask questions (maybe an image, news article, paragraph of text or short video). You then share a link to it with your students who can then begin posting their questions. What’s more, they can ‘vote’ questions up or down, so if they see someone has asked a question to which they would also like to know the answer, they can vote it up. Like many things this isn’t an activity you would just drop on the students and expect success, but with a little preparatory guidance, it offers an alternative way of soliciting questions and might provide a channel for those who would be reticent about asking questions in class.

Using Typecast offers the possibility of students preparing in advance for a new topic by encouraging them to formulate questions about the topic. This means that you’re already aware of what the misconceptions might be, what the students already know and therefore what might be the most effective route forward in starting the unit. You also have the possibility of providing certain answers which bring the whole class up to a common starting point. Typecast questioning could also be used for checking progress and understanding as a topic proceeds or towards the end of the topic as a way of checking whether concepts have been embedded.

How about taking things a step further? How about students (perhaps in pairs/groups) taking on the role of prviding the answers. Or why not make full use of the online aspect and invite participation from an external ‘expert’ from whom students can draw out information through their questions? Or even use Typecast as a way for connecting with parents and using it as a tool through which they can ask questions about a school strategy or initiative?

Typecast – not quite a discussion board … a Q&A board perhaps?

 

 

>101 Questions?

Recently Dan Meyer kicked off a Math(s)-themed project which has gained considerable traction. There are two sides to the project, but both hinge on either a single photograph or 1 minutes worth of video which acts as stimulus material. The 101 Questions site is clean and uncluttered, encouraging the user to focus on the main conceit – ‘What’s the first question that comes to your mind?’ when you are presented randomly with one from a database of images and videos.

On the one side are the contributors – anyone challenged to present an image which ‘perplexes’ the viewer sufficiently to want to ask a question. On the other side are the viewers – those challenged to provide an answer to that simple question.

Which set me thinking how this idea could be introduced in any subject in the curriculum as a way of stimulating questioning in our students, questioning rather than answering. I wouldn’t want to put words in Dan’s keyboard, but I guess having students ask questions demands of them much greater metal processing than answeringquestions the teacher has asked, to which there are often a finite number (one?) possible responses.

So maybe a lesson starter might consist of a randomly generated image (or images) for which the students have to say/write ‘What’s the first question that comes to your mind?’ The 101 Questions site could be used to provide the images, or they could have been preselected (Flickr, Picasa) in order to set up activities to come later in the lesson. Reviewing the questions that students have suggested might initiate interesting discussions – they get to drive how the lesson starts. Are you up for that challenge?

Then there’s the flip-side. Once students are used to thinking of questions about images, make them the source of those images. Have them search for images they think would perplex others and challenge other people’s thinking. Gather the images by whatever means are open to you and present them to the class. How will they react to images chosen by their peers? What will their questions be like? How will those who submitted the images feel about the responses? Managed well, it could be a rich, metacognitive experience where students learn about their learning, about each other … and maybe a bit about your subject too!