The Power of Questions

This past Friday I attended a workshop with the educational consultant, Diane Cunningham. I have attended a few of her workshops and classes over the past few years and always walk away with valuable information. This session was on supporting student questioning. We explored four different questioning strategies.

Questioning is important in the classroom because we want students to ask questions and have their questions drive learning because questioning is a key skill of critical thinkers and promotes ownership and engagement.

When I am teaching both middle school and on a college level I might share a video for students to view and discuss. I have students create a chart in their ELA Notebooks or give them an organizer that requires them to jot down what they see, what they think, what they wonder. This strategy is great to use with images, videos, and even primary sources or text.

This thinking routine is from Project Zero (Harvard Education) and encourages students to make careful observation, stimulate curiosity, and set the stage for learning or inquiry.

Another questioning strategy that I use often is QFT from The Right Question Institute. The QFT process requires students to produce as many questions as possible in a specific amount of time about a quote, image, statement or problem. Back in 2018 I wrote a blog post about the QFT method titled, “THE ONE WHO FORMULATES THE QUESTIONS OWNS THE LEARNING.” The cofounder of the Right Question Institute, Dan Rothstein argues, “The rigorous process of learning to develop and ask questions offers students the invaluable opportunity to become independent thinkers and self-directed learners.”

Rothstein and Santana have their own Question Formulation Technique (QFT) –  four rules for producing questions:

1. Ask as many questions as you can.
2. Do not stop to judge, discuss, edit, or answer any question.
3. Write down every question exactly as it was asked.
4. Change any statements into questions.

Not only is this a great strategy for students to showcase their wonderings, but it can lead to a discussion about Convergent Questions and Divergent Questions. Convergent questions focus on a correct response whereas divergent questions allow for more than one plausible and reasonable answers.

Questions have been the subject of hundreds of studies, as this Edutopia article refers to Kathleen Cotton’s research. Here are some of her most insightful takeaways in this short quiz:

1. Which is more effective for fostering learning?

A) Oral questions posed during classroom recitation

B) Written questions

2. Posing questions before a reading should be done with students who are:

A) Older/better readers

B) Younger/struggling readers

3. Increasing the use of higher-order questions to _____ percent improves student-to-student interactions, speculative thinking, length of student responses, and relevant questions posed by learners.

4. Should wait time differ when asking lower- vs. higher-order questions?

ANSWERS Answer 1: A, oral questions Answer 2: A, because young/struggling readers often read only the parts of the text that help them answer the questions. Answer 3: 50 percent. Answer 4: Yes. Wait time should be about three seconds for lower-order questions, and longer for higher-order questions.

When students are working in book clubs or literature circles I aways assign a different discussion director for each meeting. The role of the discussion director is to create questions around the big ideas or themes in the reading to help initiate a lively discussion about the text. Again, students are in charge of creating their own questions and sharing their thoughts, ideas, insights, and wonderings.

The one questioning strategy that was new to me was the question matrix designed by Andy Milne. Students are provided with the question matrix and an image, text, video, even an infographic and have to brainstorm the different questions using the stems on the question matrix. Diane had a poster size of the question matrix on the wall for students to add sticky notes with the question stems based on images viewed.

Cornell University’s Center for Teaching Innovation states, “Questions stimulate discussion and creative and critical thinking, as well as determine how students are thinking. Questions help students retain material by putting into words otherwise unarticulated thoughts.”

• Questions can diagnose student understanding of material.
• Questions are a way of engaging with students to keep their attention and to reinforce their participation.
• Questions can review, restate, emphasize, and/or summarize what is important.
• Questions stimulate discussion and creative and critical thinking, as well as determine how students are thinking.
• Questions help students retain material by putting into words otherwise unarticulated thoughts.

WW2 & The Military #Hyperdoc

This year I have created three different playlists or hyperdocs specific to aspects of World War 2. I want my students to understand about American history in order to be reflective of our current social and political climate. The first hyperdoc in this series focused on Japanese Internment and made connections to Anti Asian Hate today. The second hyperdoc focused on the Holocaust and shared data on anti semitism that is prevalent today. The final hyperdoc highlights race and gender among military members who served in the armed forces. Many Black Americans, Native American Indians, Japanese Americans, and Women were discriminated yet still participated in the War efforts.

I began with a National Geographic documentary about a 92 years old, World War II paratrooper Les Cruise is one of the last surviving veterans who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day.

After viewing the short documentary students answered these questions in their ELA Notebooks

Although the United States Armed Forces were officially segregated until 1948, WWII laid the foundation for civil rights and women’s rights. American minorities felt a contradiction in the wartime experience. While they were fighting overseas to save democracy, freedoms at home were still limited for people of color. Strong racial prejudices, centuries old, still existed in the United States, and racial conflicts on the home front escalated during the war years. The hyperdoc addresses these concerns and highlights the contributions of Black Americans, Native American Indians, Japanese Infantry, and Women’s helping hands on the Homefront and overseas.

This 14 slide hyperdoc has four different chapters to help students understand the role of minority military personnel. Grab a copy here. Students have choice readings, videos, and web explorations about Navajo Code Talkers based on an online exhibit from the National Museum of the Native American Indian and a web quest on women’s contributions to the American Armed Forces.

Let me know what you and your students learn.

John F. Kennedy as a Writing Mentor & Model: Writing & Social Action

This week I took a trip to The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, MA. The museum is “dedicated to preserving and providing access to the legacy of the 35th President of the United States.”

  

Among all the artifacts, photographs, and videos, JFK’s writings were at the forefront. The museum and library present the depth of John F. Kennedy’s writing from his schooling days, his honors thesis that was turned into a book, his writing Portraits of Courage, and the countless speeches he wrote (along with his aide, Ted Sorenson) and presented during the time he was in office. It is intriguing that the Museum begins with information about JFK as a young person and highlights his lack of focus and academic rigor in high school. In fact, it is clear based on his high school grades that school was not JFK’s priority. His French teacher wrote, “Jack’s work varies from excellent to extremely poor. . . he has to make the decision between mediocrity and worthwhile work, – and Jack should never be content with the former.” As one progresses throughout the museum, it is clear that JFK’s work moving forward was more than worthwhile.

  

Looking at Kennedy’s writings it is clear that he borrowed from many models and mentors himself to produce one of the greatest speeches in American history. Kennedy’s inaugural address taps into key themes Kennedy wanted to convey to the American people at the beginning of an era:  peace, freedom, service to others, and personal accountability. The speech itself contains contributions or borrowings from, the Old Testament, the New Testament, and president Lincoln. It has been said that the line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do from your country” was adapted from Kennedy’s headmaster at Choate.

As a writer, Kennedy was always revising his speeches and looking at the original scripts, one can see the revisions he made in his own handwriting to get the words out just right. His words are meticulous and thoughtful. He used his words to present ideas about war and peace, the possibility of the space program, to advocate for people with intellectual disabilities, when facing a moral crisis and efforts to pass comprehensive civil rights legislation, and to celebrate great writers and artists.

As a teacher, I am always looking for models and mentors for my students to understand the writing process, the craft of writing, and how words are powerful to move masses of people to change thoughts and actions.

Author and teacher, Kelly Gallagher writes in In The Best Interest of Students (Stenhouse, 2015), “students benefit when they pay close attention to models before they begin drafting, they benefit when they pay close attention to models while they are drafting, and they benefit when they pay close attention to models as they begin moving their drafts into revision. Mentor texts achieve maximum effectiveness when students frequently revisit them throughout the writing process.” Kennedy’s writing can be used to study history and the craft of writing. So many of his speeches are mentor texts for our students.

As JFK wrote in the speech for Dallas before his assassination (and was never able to present), “The United States is a peaceful nation. And where our strength and determination are clear, our words need merely to convey conviction, not belligerence.” Throughout his 1,036 days in office, John F. Kennedy’s words were clear and full of conviction, precise and provoking. Aren’t these the same characteristics we want to see in our students’ writing and thinking?