Thoughts on teaching & educational technology

Student-driven inquiry can’t take place if students don’t know how to ask good questions. This is probably the greatest impediment to doing any sort of inquiry-based assignment, to say nothing of making it a regular process. In my experience as a teacher, students know how to answer questions given to them, so long as they are directly tied to the text, lecture, or other class materials. But they are ill-equipped, and generally averse to, framing their own.

Why it is important to teach students how to frame clear, targeted questions? Don’t we have to teach our content? Who has time for ’soft’ skills not mandated by the standards? And forget about it if you’re teaching to/for/under a standardized test, right? Those are the sorts of responses I’ve heard from many teachers when asked if they’d be willing to take the time to teach question-writing to students. But inquiry can’t begin, and can’t become a habit of thought & work, if students can’t — or won’t — ask questions.

At the beginning of the year my students are usually happy to know that I don’t teach my American History classes in the normal fashion. Instead of proceeding through the years chronologically, beginning at some fixed point in the past and trying to make it as close to today by the end of the year, I teach thematically. I’m not going to delve into what that means, and how I do it, in this post — that’s not my point — but it’s enough to know that the students are generally happy to hear that this is not going to be just another history course, so much like the many they’ve already taken. Quickly, however, they realize that while doing things in the normal fashion may be dry, it is also predictable, and therefore safe. When I put the weight of the learning process — that is, the construction of knowledge & understanding — on them, they realize that ‘different’ does not mean ‘easier.’

So how do I get them to ask questions, and good ones at that? The first thing they need to learn is that there are different types of questions, which seek different types of answers — this may sound obvious, but this kind of metacognition is not natural to most high school students. They’ve been so busy having content crammed down their throats that very few of them have ever taken a moment to consider how this is all taking place. I refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy at this point, to show that there are different levels of thought, from the most basic to the most advanced, with each level serving different purposes — yet all are important. I’ll describe how I use Bloom’s, and how it ties in with student-driven inquiry, more in a future post.

Anyway, the question-writing model I use first is called Levels of Questions, which I learned several years ago at an AP Summer Institute. If you do a search online for the model, you’ll find several different forms of it, but the form I’ll describe here is the one that I was taught, and after looking at others, I believe this one makes most sense. The facilitator introduced us to it as a reading strategy — as something students could do when assigned readings for class — but I’ve used it as my introduction to question-framing far more than just as a reading strategy.

Anyway, LoQ, as we refer to it at Empire, is made up of three levels — I, II, and III. Level 1 questions seek facts; they always begin with who, what, where, when, how many (a specific number), or how long (a specific duration). They should be answerable with one sentence, since they each seek only one fact. They are direct, unambiguous, and their answers are explicit in any text or other resource used. Level 1 questions are nothing to debate — they are facts only, and form the foundation of whatever topic is being considered. Level 2 questions always and only begin with how or why, and seek answers that describe process and reason. They take the L1 facts and tie them together into some kind of rational context in order to tell a story. The answers to L2 questions are often implied rather than clearly stated in whatever text or resources are being used, and therefore require more thought on the part of the writer and audience. Level 3 questions do not refer directly to the text; rather, they are a result of consideration of and reaction to what the topic means or suggests to the student. In jargon, it’s “out of the box,” synthetic or values-based.

In my next post I’ll provide examples of each level.
jdg