What You Ask ' ' ' Is What You Get Teaching Thinking Through Effective Questioning

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What You Ask . . . Is What You Get!Teaching
Thinking Through Effective Questioning

• Melisa Hancock
• And
• David S. Allen

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• The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire
  to be ignited.
• (Plutarch)

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Goals of the Session

• Demonstrate the link between asking questions at
  the appropriate level of difficulty and students
  performance in mathematics.
• Strategies for writing and/or asking Higher Level
  Questions.
• Tasks that get at DEPTH of KNOWLEDGE

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What is Higher-Order Thinking?

• Higher-order thinking by students involves the
  transformation of information and ideas. This
  transformation occurs when students combine facts
  and ideas and synthesise, generalise, explain,
  hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or
  interpretation. Manipulating information and
  ideas through these processes allows students to
  solve problems, gain understanding and discover
  new meaning. When students engage in the
  construction of knowledge, an element of
  uncertainty is introduced into the instructional
  process and the outcomes are not always
  predictable in other words, the teacher is not
  certain what the students will produce. In
  helping students become producers of knowledge,
  the teachers main instructional task is to
  create activities or environments that allow them
  opportunities to engage in higher-order thinking.
• Dept. of Education (New Zealand, 2002)

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Why Do You Ask Questions?
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Why do you ask questions?

• 47 managerial
• 43 informational
• 10 higher-order
• National Educational Service

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What Does the Research Say?

• Discussion
• 32 classroom observations
• 611 questions asked
• 80 of the questions closed-ended questions
  requiring little student thought or input
  (450/611)
• 11 asked students to analyze content/topic
  (64/611)
• 6 required students to synthesize information
  and generate new ideas (36/611)
• 3 asked students to evaluate the topic or idea
  (21)
• Important NoteThese teachers were using a
  Standards-Based Curriculum and they knew they
  were going to be observed. They were asked to
  teach an inquiry-based lesson.

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Research by the Department of Labor says students
spend

• 22 reading and writing
• 23 speaking
• 55 listening
• A question is useless if you do not LISTEN
  carefully to the response. IT IS WHAT YOU DO
  WITH THE RESPONSE THAT COUNTS!

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• The griney grollers grangled in the granchy gak.

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The Griney Grollers Thinking Skills Test

• What kind of grollers were they?
• What did the grollers do?
• Where did they do it?
• In what kind of gak did they grangle?
• Place one line under the subject and two lines
  under the verb.
• In one sentence, explain why the grollers were
  grangling in the grancy gak. Be prepared to
  justify your answer with facts.
• If you had to grangle in a granchy gak, what one
  item would you choose to have with you and why?

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Moral

• Students can answer low-level questions without
  thinking.
• Students enter/exit classrooms with no more
  understanding of what theyve learned than The
  Griney Groller taught you!

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BLOOMS REVISED TAXONOMYCreatingGenerating
new ideas, products, or ways of viewing
thingsDesigning, constructing, planning,
producing, inventing. EvaluatingJustifying a
decision or course of actionChecking,
hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting,
judging  AnalyzingBreaking information into
parts to explore understandings and
relationshipsComparing, organizing,
deconstructing, interrogating, finding Applying
Using information in another familiar
situationImplementing, carrying out, using,
executing UnderstandingExplaining ideas or
conceptsInterpreting, summarizing, paraphrasing,
classifying, explaining RememberingRecalling
informationRecognising, listing, describing,
retrieving, naming, finding 
Higher Order Thinking
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What Are Good Questions?

• They help students make sense of the
  content/topic.
• They are open-ended, whether in answer or
  approach. There may be multiple answers or
  multiple approaches.
• They empower students to unravel their
  misconceptions.
• They not only require the application of facts
  and procedures but encourage students to make
  connections and generalizations.
• They are accessible to all students in their
  language and offer an entry point for all
  students. (Sum of 3 cons. s)
• Their answers lead students to wonder more about
  a topic and to perhaps construct new questions
  themselves as they investigate this newly found
  interest.

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Effective Questioning

• To be an effective questioner, it is better to
  use the students response to guide your next
  question than to use your question to guide the
  students response.

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• Progressing from simple questions to more
  difficult ones that require reasoning helps
  students develop cognitive abilities and critical
  thinking skills.
• (Kappa Delta Pi, Fall 2005)

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Mathematical KnowledgeDifferences Defined

• 1.Conceptual Knowledge (logical relationships,
  representations, an understanding and ability to
  talk, write and give examples of these
  relationships, etc.)
• 2. Procedural Knowledge (knowledge of rules and
  procedures used in carrying out routine
  mathematical tasks and the symbols used to
  represent mathematics)

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What You Ask . .Is What You Get!

• Good questions can be used as the basis for an
  entire lesson that stands alone or as part of a
  unit of work.
• It is important to PLAN the questions in advance.

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How To Create Good Questions

• Method 1 - Working Backward
• Step 1 Identify a topic or lesson
• Step 2 Think of a closed question and
• write down the answer.
• Step 3 Make up a question that
• includes (or addresses) the
• answer.

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Method 1- Example

• Step 1 Topic Averages
• Step 2 Closed question The children in the
  Hancock family are aged 27, 39, 45, 51, 33. What
  is their average age? (39)
• Step 3 Good Question There are five children
  in a family. Their average is 39. How old might
  the children be?

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Method 2-Adapting a Standard Question

• Step 1 Identify a topic
• Step 2 Think of a standard question
• Step 3 Adapt it to make a good
• question

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Method 2-Example

• Step 1 Topic for tomorrow is measuring length
  using nonstandard units.
• Step 2 A typical exercise might be What is the
  length of your table measured in hand spans?
• Step 3 The good questions could be
• Can you find an object that is three hand
  spans long?

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Teachers Responsibilities in Presenting Good
Questions

• understand the content embedded in the question
• present the question clearly using accessible
  content language
• set clear and reasonable expectations for student
  work
• allow for individual approaches, methods, and/or
  answers
• add variety or more data to a question to ensure
  accessibility for all students
• make good use of concrete materials
• allow ample time for discovery and consolidation
  of answers, strategies, and the discovered
  mathematics

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• A good teacher makes you think even when you
  dont want to.
• (Fisher, 1998, Teaching Thinking)

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DIVING DEEPER INTO THINKING
Remembering Understanding
Applying
Analyzing Evaluating
Creating
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Remembering Understanding Ap
plying
Analyzing Evaluating
Creating