Whose Questions?
If you've ever interacted with four or five-year-olds, you quickly realized one of their favorite words is “Why”. Children are naturally inquisitive. Unfortunately, as children grow older, they lose much of that inquisitiveness. The graph below shows that questioning, which is robust in childhood, steadily declines until retirement.
(NV AtCEPImperial)
Who gets to ask the questions in the classroom? The teacher? The students? In his 2015 article, Who’s Asking?, Alfie Kohn stated that "it makes sense to generate thoughtful questions for students but even more important to elicit their questions.” So, the answer to “Whose Questions?” is both, teacher AND student. One of the most important teacher practices is designing and posing questions (Costa & Callick, 2015). However, when the setting is right children can raise the right questions for themselves, thus unleashing the power of intrinsic motivation, (Kohn, 2015).
Teachers nor students should sit around and wait for the other to come up with questions. Teachers can take a more purposeful approach in designing and posing questions and students can also be empowered to generate questions.
In their article, "Five Strategies for Questioning with Intention", Costa and Kallick (2015) list five strategies for teachers to use to improve their approach to questioning.
- Do you use questions at all cognitive levels? All levels of questioning are valid and necessary to scaffold a learning experience for students. Teachers must consider questions and taxonomies that include three cognitive levels: input of data, processing data and output of concepts.
- Do your questions build on positive assumptions? Consider a positive mindset when asking questions, eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive. For example instead of asking “Are you sure you can do this project?” which has a negative connotation consider asking “What goals are you considering for this project?”. This acknowledges insight and demonstrates trust.
- Do your questions build habits of mind? Costa and Kallick identify “attributes that human beings display when they behave intelligently” and teachers have the opportunity to build contextual understanding but also develop the habits of mind by carefully designing questioning opportunities.
- Do your questions encourage reflection? Students should be invited to examine and take charge of their own thinking process. Consider these examples:
- How did striving for accuracy and precision improve your product?
- As you talked to yourself about this problem, what new insights did you generate?
- How did your group choose roles?
- Do you pose long-range eternal questions? Does the end of the unit signal the end of the questions? Questions that allow the students to ponder and reconsider are those that are so universal that they capture the philosophical inclinations of students of all ages and subjects. For example What is truth, and how do we know it?
Assessment for Learning
In the 2013 text, Assessment for Learning, Black, Harrison, Marshall, and Wiliam describe how teachers participated in a formative assessment project to help transform their formative assessment using research based practices in the classroom. One of the four areas of focus was questioning. The main suggestions for action were:
- Spend more effort framing questions that are worth asking; questions which explore issues that are critical to the development of students’ understanding.
- Wait time has to be increased to allow students several seconds to process and everyone is expected to have an answer. All answers contribute to understanding and the goal is thoughtful improvement rather than an automatic right answer.
- Follow-up activities should provide opportunity for meaningful interventions to extend understanding.
Questioning as a Tool of Inquiry
Composing questions inspires intellectual agency, a sense of exigency and a claim to purpose (Hand, Wallace, & Yang, 2004; Rosenshine, Meister, & Chapman, 1996). Yet a disparity remains: teachers hold a monopoly on question generation (Chin, 2006, 2007).
Questioning is a tool that is used for inquiry throughout the learning process. Many people think the teacher asks the questions and the student answers the questions, and they would be right. As children start their lives, they ask a ton of questions each day; as those same children get older and go through school, they ask less and less. Knowing that questioning is a tool of inquiry; this previous statement should be a false statement. Teachers should foster questioning skills that lead to high levels of learning and engagement for students.
One study compared two groups of students' argumentative writing. The study looked at differences in gender, writing programs, and other factors. None showed a statistically significant difference except the Question Formulation Technique. One group was given this instruction and one was not. In the control group, nearly 52% of the time was dedicated to the instructional time of the traditional writing curriculum with QFT embedded in it, the comparison group only had 40% of their time dedicated to the traditional writing curriculum and some of this time was not spent accurately implementing the writing curriculum.
Three different settings were used: whole class, small group, and one-on-one. These settings allowed for peer editing where students were able to refine their questioning skills. Treatment teacher logs show that students continued practicing with question generation and evaluation of question effectiveness throughout the intervention (Fernand, 2016). Using QFT, students continued to apply this work individually, outside of their group, including: brainstorming, revising, and prioritizing additional questions, which enabled them to develop their arguments further (Fernand, 2016).
The take-away from this research is that education needs to specifically incorporate student questioning, and teach students to engage in using these questions. These types of questions can guide students to a deeper level of thinking- critical thinking. Teachers also need professional development that helps them transition from teacher to student generated questions.
Questioning is a tool that is used for inquiry throughout the learning process. Many people think the teacher asks the questions and the student answers the questions, and they would be right. As children start their lives, they ask a ton of questions each day; as those same children get older and go through school, they ask less and less. Knowing that questioning is a tool of inquiry; this previous statement should be a false statement. Teachers should foster questioning skills that lead to high levels of learning and engagement for students.
One study compared two groups of students' argumentative writing. The study looked at differences in gender, writing programs, and other factors. None showed a statistically significant difference except the Question Formulation Technique. One group was given this instruction and one was not. In the control group, nearly 52% of the time was dedicated to the instructional time of the traditional writing curriculum with QFT embedded in it, the comparison group only had 40% of their time dedicated to the traditional writing curriculum and some of this time was not spent accurately implementing the writing curriculum.
Three different settings were used: whole class, small group, and one-on-one. These settings allowed for peer editing where students were able to refine their questioning skills. Treatment teacher logs show that students continued practicing with question generation and evaluation of question effectiveness throughout the intervention (Fernand, 2016). Using QFT, students continued to apply this work individually, outside of their group, including: brainstorming, revising, and prioritizing additional questions, which enabled them to develop their arguments further (Fernand, 2016).
The take-away from this research is that education needs to specifically incorporate student questioning, and teach students to engage in using these questions. These types of questions can guide students to a deeper level of thinking- critical thinking. Teachers also need professional development that helps them transition from teacher to student generated questions.
Take a moment to watch the following video on questioning strategies.
(CLAS Network, 2015)