Sunday, October 6, 2013
Week 6 - Questioning
After reading Chapter 8, I was left reflecting on my own experience as a student. In middle school and high school I had teachers that would have us jot down questions in our notes or on sticky notes in the text. I hated doing that. I felt that the teachers were always looking for "focused" questions (122) which I might not have had or the questions would go unacknowledged and unanswered. Even now as a college student, I rarely write down questions, I'd rather As a teacher, I understand the importance of students' questioning. We want our students to be able to monitor their comprehension, to seek out information , think critically about the text, and be able to discuss and debate with textual evidence. Since I had such a poor experience with how questioning was implemented when I was a student, I don't know how I would carry it out in my own classroom. So my questions to you, are how do you plan to encourage and implement questioning in our classrooms and what ways will you follow through with the questions so that each student feels like they were listened to and got some feedback?
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I think you asked a great question. On p.123 in the book, Harvey & Goudvis talk about "lingering questions". Here they discuss how many students finish reading or doing an activity and are left with questions that remain unanswered. They suggest that "we encourage kids to engage in further conversation about a great read or take action in response to compelling information, so we constantly model and encourage kids to ask and consider lingering questions". Having a class discussion about these wonderings will help students feel that they are being listened to by allowing them to bring them up to the class (or to a small group, such as their table partners). Another idea is to follow the lesson format outlined on p.111-112 titled "The More We Learn, the More We Wonder". Here, we could start a lesson and then make an anchor chart together as a class. On the anchor chart there would be a column titled "I learned" and a column titled "I wonder". As a class we would fill in this chart and then go back through the lesson/reading and try to answer our questions. Something a professor taught me in TE 401 was to have a classroom "wonder wall". Any questions that may come up during or after a lesson about a certain topic can be posted to the wonder wall. When there is extra time at some point during that week, teachers can pull one question off the wonder wall and, as a class, try and find out the answer. This may require the teacher to pull up a website on the Promethean board, or look at other resources. Once students post their questions on the wonder wall, teachers should look for what kinds of resources they will need to answer the questions before they select a question later that day or in the following days. With younger students, teachers will have to facilitate the "research" component, but it will serve as a good model of how to find out things we don't know. In older grades, students may be able to look up and find answers to their questions on their own.
ReplyDeleteI think you are asking a very valid question here. Many students, including you and I, have had poor experiences with questioning in our schooling experiences. I think a lot of this has to do with what Harvey and Goudvis say about, “schools [appearing] more interested in answers than in questions” (pg. 109). When students do not learn how to question their readings from the time they learn how to read and keep this in practice throughout their academic career—they may not develop the questioning skills that would have allowed them to reach their reading and learning potential.
ReplyDeleteHarvey and Goudvis also talk about the importance of building students’ background knowledge so that they have the tools to ask questions—so I think a good technique to use in our future classrooms is for us to expose our students to the necessary background information that would allow them to ask good questions. For instance, our class recently read a book about a beach and my MT prompted the students to talk about the things they would see at the beach. Many of my students raised their hand to offer answers but their answers were irrelevant to a beach setting. Upon further questioning, we realized that most of the students had either never been to a beach or did not know what a beach was! How can we expect students to answer or ask questions about a beach if they do not know what it is! From this experience, I think it is really important to ensure that all student’s have a general understanding of the big ideas/topics of a reading before they are asked questions or to question the reading.
Furthermore, another good way to encourage questioning in our classrooms is by modeling and asking questions ourselves! And to answer your question about how to follow through with the questions, I like how Jessica brought up the “Wonder Wall”—I think something similar to this would be a good way to elicit “wonders” and provide feedback. And though I think it is important for each student to feel like they were listened to—I do not think they all need individualized feedback. I think it would be good for the students to learn to find the answers to their questions themselves so that they can become independent learners and not rely on a teacher or their peers for support.
I completely agree with Rosaria and Chi Wan, with not knowing how to take full advantage of our students’ great questions. Since we are in kindergarten, students have not yet experienced the fact that a lot of their questions and comments about stories are being shut down. As Harvey and Goudvis state on pg 109, “curiosity spawns questions”, and right now our 4 – 5 year olds are so incredibly curious. It is so so important that we take time to really invest in this curiosity to keep that interest in them alive, but with so much to fit into one day, how do we as teachers possibly fit in all of their questions and make each one of them feel inspired to be even more curious to expand their teaching.
ReplyDeleteI believe that it is important to teach students about all of the different types of questions there are during reading that is mentioned in this chapter, such as keeping a question in mind while reading, questions that lead to inferential thinking, “beyond-the-line” questions, researchable questions, lingering questions, authentic questions, and assessment questions. These are SO many questions. If students are aware of all of the different types of questions that they could possibly have, students may be able to feel they have more of a role in their classroom. For example, if students have a question in mind while they are reading, they could possibly answer their own question by themselves! If students have a researchable question, they could get the skills they need to answer their question by doing research. By making students aware of the different questions they could ask, and how many different ways of answering these questions, they might not be as discouraged when we ask them to put their hands down. I do try to answer and talk to as many students as I can, but if I talk to all of my students, my whole day could be spent answering questions. If students feel like they can take responsibility for answering some of the questions they have, maybe that will inspire them to keep being curious readers.
With that, we might not have to talk to every individual student about every individual question they may have. If we give our students their “tool belts” with the necessary tools to create and answer their own questions, we might have curious students still able to ask questions, and keep them interested in not only their books, but all of the subjects that are taught at school.
But at the same time, how do we give the student these tools to be able to do this? Harvey and Goudvis do state on page 126 that anchor charts are a great way to model such a “variety of strategies”, but what else can we do as educators?