L@S Breakout 3: Get a grip on improving learner questions
February 24, 2009 by belindajjohnston
Presenter: Trevor Bond
A thinker is a learner.
A learner is a questioner.
A questioner is a learner
A thinker is a questioner.
Questioning is the engine house of thinking (de bono)
Questioning is our most important intellectural tool (Neil Postman)
Who asks the mosts questions in the classroom – teachers or students and to what ratio?
Teachers 99.98% (mostly administrative and convergent, divergent are the minority)
Students 0.02%
‘When I ask questions my teacher gets angry’ article in Teachers Matter.
Teacher questions very different to learner questions. Learners are wanting to fill in the holes in their understanding, knowledge and skills. There are three main types of learner questions:
- Requests
- Rhetoric – the answer is not the agenda, both parties already know the answer (disguised imperative)
- Inquiry
- Primary layer of questioning – fertile, essential, inquiry, rich, reflective, questions – drives the learning, cannot be answered until you have asked and answered a whole lot of other questions. No one right answer and many possible conflicting answers.
- Secondary layer – subsidiary questions, fact finding, information seeking, open, closed, fat, skinny, key, search
- Intermediary layer – in between these two layers is the thinking process! Diagnostic, analytical, evaluative questions.
What are the core skills of an effective questioner?
- identify the need or the problem
- identify the relevant contextual vocabulary
- ask a range of relelvant questions
- take them to a variety of appropriate sources
- persist, editing quetions as necessary, until they acquire the needed information
What is a good learner question?
- It is relevant
- Can be taken to intelligent (person) and non-intelligent sources (stored information eg google)
- Gets you the information that is needed
Poor questions
- Where can I find it? – what is it
- What skills do I need? – for what
- How do I get there?- where is there, where are you now
We all often ask poor questions and get away with them because those involved know what the context is, thus we often model poor questions. By answering poor questions instead of teaching students to ask better ones we also promote poor questions.
Questioning Skill Taxonomy
- Skills of an effective questioner (see above)
- Stage 1 – created statements rather than questions (or a nul response)
- Stage 2 – any non-relevant question (does not contain contextual key words or phrases)
- Stage 3 – asks yes/no/maybe questions using relevant key words and/or phrases (is, can, does, could, may, would etc)
- Stage 4 – uses the seven servants (who, what, when, where, how, why and which) and the key words to write a relevant questions
- Stage 5 – uses the seven servents, relevant key words and phrases to write relevant questions
- Stage 6 – using relevant synonyms of key words to edit key questions
- Stage 7 – uses multiple question words to create a probing question when interviewing an “expert”
The target is to operate between stages 3 and 7 as necessary.
Skimming and scanning digitally – edit – find – [keyword] – next reference etc. Can be done on browser, word, pdf etc.
Evidence of success – cohort analysis, track the questioning stage over each year level
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