by Violet Dickson
Cluster Specialist
Arts, AV Technology &
Communication
“To
raise new questions, new problems, to regard old problems from a new angle
requires creative imagination and makes real advances.” Albert Einstein
A few
years ago, I decided to investigate the different types of student and teacher talk
that occur every day in an ordinary classroom. To accomplish this, I video-taped
my classroom for a period of six weeks and afterwards analyzed the videos as
part of a teacher action research project (Dickson, 2005). It was an
eye-opening experience!
I was
familiar with the decade-long study conducted by Allington and Johnston (2002)
that identified productive student talk as the “single most striking feature in
effective classrooms” (p. 463). “Productive” talk in this study was defined as
student discussions, elaboration, collaboration, and other means of negotiating
information that allowed students to become active participants in the learning
process. Productive student talk was also thought to be a result of thoughtful
and strategic questioning on the part of the classroom teacher.
Effective
questioning strategies are some of a teacher’s most valuable tools. Teachers’
questioning skills are important for “eliciting student reflection and
challenging deeper student engagement” (Danielson, 1996, p. 92). However, not all
questions are created equal. They range from low level, rapid-fire questions
that result in short answers to higher-level, open-ended questions that lead to
problem-solving, reasoning, and the ability to learn in puzzling situations
(Joyce, Weil, & Calhoun, 2000). It is estimated that most questions asked
by teachers (approximately 60%) are lower cognitive questions, 20% are higher
cognitive questions, and 20% are procedural (Allington & Johnston, 2002;
Applegate, Quinn, & Applegate, 2002; Cotton, 2001).
I understood
the power of effective questioning to provoke curiosity, stimulate thinking,
and actively engage students in learning. After all, I was a seasoned teacher! I
stayed current on research and implemented effective teaching strategies in my
classroom. So I became curious about the kind of talk that went on in my classroom. I wanted to know how much
student talk could be classified as productive versus non-productive talk. I
also wanted to identify the different kinds of “teacher talk” that occurred in
my classroom and determine whether it seemed to encourage or inhibit productive
student talk (Dickson, 2005).
I’ve got
to say that watching yourself and your classroom on tape is an interesting
experience. I was initially pleased that, although some talk in the classroom
was off-task, most of the student talk was productive and related to the
activity or project in which students were engaged. I attributed this to the
fact that I incorporated project-based learning activities into many of the
lessons, thereby engaging students more effectively in the learning process.
However, I
got a little surprise when I examined teacher discourse. First of all, even
though there was an almost constant hum of student voices, I was surprised at
how much of the talk on tape was my own. Although this included instructional
talk, responsive talk (responding to students), praise, and procedural talk,
the greatest amount of “teacher talk” was in the form of questioning. Questions
came from all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, including lower levels (knowledge and
comprehension) as well as higher levels (application, analysis, synthesis, and
evaluation). However, more questions than I expected were at the lower end of the spectrum. I also had to
chuckle at myself when I discovered that at times, I even asked and answered my
own questions, thereby eliminating the processing time students needed to work
through problems for themselves!
This
little experiment opened my eyes to some flaws in my teaching style and allowed
me to make immediate changes. I became more aware of the questions I asked, and
I made a conscious effort to deepen students’ learning by including questions
that encouraged them to go beyond concrete information. One technique I began
using was to piggy-back lower-level questions with higher-level,
inferential-type questions and then ask students to elaborate further on the
information.
Marzano
(2007) encourages the use of questioning techniques that “require students to
elaborate on information” (p. 48). This can be accomplished by pairing general
inferential questions with elaborative interrogation-types of questions.
General inferential questioning requires students to go beyond the information
presented: “What do you think would happen if…?” or “What do you think will
happen as a result?” Elaborative interrogation questions go beyond a student’s
inferential response by adding: “Why do you think this is true?” Requiring
students to elaborate information forces them to examine their thinking, leading
to the use of higher processing skills and resulting in higher levels of
responses.
Another
questioning technique that has received quite a bit of attention involves the
identification of “essential questions”. Wiggins and McTighe (2005) define
essential questions as those that lie at the heart of any subject and help to
uncover a subject through inquiry. Essential questions “do not yield a single,
straightforward answer, but produce different plausible responses, about which
thoughtful and knowledgeable people may disagree” (p. 342). Some examples of
essential questions include:
·
How can government
provide national security without endangering civil liberties?
·
Is the
President’s power adequate?
·
Is there a
pattern present, and if so, what does the pattern reveal?
·
What is
art?
·
How do
different conceptions of beauty influence a work of art?
·
What are
the advantages and disadvantages of using mathematical models?
·
How are
spatial relationships (including shape and dimension) used to represent real
situations and solve problems?
In
addition to the teacher posing essential questions, Marzano (2007) suggests
students learn to identify their own essential questions, leading to further
exploration of a topic of their interest. Teachers can assist students in this process
by providing them with essential questions that lead in to a preferred topic of
study. Some examples of essential lead-in questions include:
·
Is there
an important hypothesis you would like to test, related to the content you are
studying?
·
Is there a
problem you would like to examine?
·
Is there a
concept you would like to investigate further?
·
Would you
like to examine other possibilities or explanations to this problem/situation?
·
Would you
like to consider possible consequences to the present actions?
·
Would you
like to examine a hypothetical future event relevant to the content you are
studying?
I believe
it is vital for teachers to examine and reflect on their own questioning techniques
from time to time. Thoughtful and skillful questioning by the teacher leads to
rich classroom discussions and productive student talk. Questioning motivates students to examine
content to a greater extent, reflect on their understanding, explore new
possibilities, and become more engaged in the learning process. Teachers’ well-crafted
questions also provide modeling for students, teaching them to form their own
questions that will challenge them to explore content on a deeper level.
For further study:
Allington, R. L., & Johnston, P.
H. (2002). Reading to learn: Lessons from
exemplary fourth-grade classrooms. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Applegate, M. D., Quinn, K. B.,
& Applegate, A. J. (2002). Levels of thinking required by comprehension
questions in informal reading inventories. The
Reading Teacher, 56, 174-180.
Cotton,
K. (2001). Classroom questioning. Portland,
OR: North West Regional Educational Laboratory.
Danielson,
C. (1996). Enhancing professional practice: A framework for teaching.
Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Dickson,
V. (2005). The nature of student and teacher discourse in an elementary
classroom. In B. S. Stern (Ed.), Curriculum
and Teaching Dialogue (pp. 109-122). Greenwich, CT: Information Age
Publishing.
Joyce,
R., Weil, M., & Calhoun, E. (2000). Models
of teaching (6th ed). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Marzano,
R. J. (2007). The art and science of
teaching: A comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Alexandria,
VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Wiggins,
G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding
by design (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision
and Curriculum Development.
Students,
Parents, Teachers, and Counselors, please let me introduce you to O*NET OnLine www.onetonline.org. The Occupational Information Network (O*NET)
is a free digital database for exploring and searching occupations that exist
within the United States economy. This program is developed under the
sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Labor/Employment and Training
Administration through a grant to the North Carolina Department of Commerce. O*NET
OnLine is the electronic replacement of a seventy year old Federal publication
known as Dictionary of Occupational Titles.
