Sunday 28 February 2016

The Power of Questioning Part 3

Questioning Practice #3: Scaffold Student Responses to Deepen Thinking

Teachers need to plan how they will respond to anticipated student responses or comments. Teachers will respond with comments or questions, but this should be carefully planned to be able to scaffold student thinking. A teachers choice of response to a students answers can either promote thinking or shut it down. This will all depend on a teachers purpose, timing and working.

An interesting point to consider is that research shows that teachers tend to shut down student thinking when they provide positive feedback or praise. At first this seems counterintuitive, but the point is that when a teacher communicates agreement with one student’s thinking, both that student and his classmates conclude that there is no need for further thought because the teacher got the answer he was looking for.

Walsh and Sattes argue that the the and frequency of teacher scaffolding will vary based on the different forms of discussion:

a) Teacher-guided discussion - the teacher is prepared to provide large doses of scaffolding to help students develop the social and cognitive skills for a disciplined discussion. This type of discussion is best when students are first learning norms and processes of effective discussion. Teachers will come with a full arsenal of follow-up questions to direct student talk.

b) Structured small-group discussion - teachers will select specific protocols that support peer scaffolding of one another’s thinking and engagement. Examples of both of these will be discussed later.

Questioning Practice #4: Create a Culture for Thoughtful Discussion

Thoughtful discussion is a collaborative process that cannot take place in a competitive classroom where students are competing for the teachers attention and grades. Similarly, thoughtful discussion cannot take place in a teacher-centerer room with a right-answer culture. On the other hand, it does flourish in a classroom that celebrates curiosity, inquiry and discovery.

Walsh discusses three norms that are common in classrooms that promote thoughtful discussion: Purposes of questions, think times and participation.

1) Purposes of Questions

a) Use the focus question to stimulate and unlock your own thinking about the embedded issue or concept. This means that students must believe that the teacher is not looking for one specific correct answer.

b) Use the focus question to assist in zeroing in on what you know and think about the issue or concept embedded in the question. An open ended question does not mean anything goes. The entire class has to take responsibility that all participants offer logic and evidence to support their positions.

c) Ask questions when you are curios, perplexed or confused or when you need clarification.

2) Think Time

The honouring of silence is critical to a deep and productive discussion. This allows students to clarify their own thinking and to understand the thinking of others. Murray Budd Rowe (1986) identified two types of wait times: Wait Time 1 is the pause after the asking of a question, before anyone responds. Wait Time 2 is the pause after someone speaks, before another speaker reacts. According to Rowe, the recommended wait time is 3-5 seconds. Walsh recommends that as a minimum, but often a bit more is necessary to be effective. Students need to learn to value this silence.

Walsh uses the term think time in place of wait time as it connects more to the reflection that we are aiming for. Here are three norms that show students how to use this time:

a) Use think time to reflect. When someone poses a question or comment to you, use this time to reflect and think about your response.

b) Give others time to reflect.

c) Treat silence like gold. This is such an important time, where we can process what others say, rethinking our positions, or consolidate our thinking.

3) Participation

The goal is to get as many people as possible to be active participants in the discussion. Is everyone comfortable to speak? Do students encourage their peers to participate, especially the quiet ones?

a) Speak as you are motivate to speak, without raising your hand. This is a hard habit to break, but hand raising breaks the flow of the conversation.

b) Talk to one another, not the teacher. Most of us spend out years in class looking to the teacher for affirmation that our comments were good. The focus on good discussion is for students to build on one another’s ideas. Consider moving students desks into a formation that promotes this.

c) Share what you are thinking so others can learn from you. This thought is to be shared with the shy students so we give them the message that everyone’s thoughts and ideas help the entire class.

d) Monitor your talk so as not to monopolize the conversation.

e) Listen to others respectfully, asking questions to understand.

f) Encourage others to speak, particularly those who are not participating.

The main idea here is that questioning for discussion requires teachers to take on a different role for the traditional classroom. They should frame one question for discussion and then remove themselves a bit. They should not comment on each students idea’s until the classmates have a chance to do so. Similarly, they should encourage the students to critique each other before they do so.

Links to Interesting Articles:

1. 3 Videos on the Importance of Empathy

2. Empathy in the Classroom: Why Should I Care?

3. 4 Strategies for Teaching Students How to Revise

4. The Benefits of Adding Video to Teacher Evaluations

Links to Interesting Web Tools:

1. Fun Way to Build Math, Prime Number Intuition

2. Quizalize for building Interactive Review Games

3. 7 Tools for Building Multimedia Quizzes Compared in One Chart

Quote of the Day:

1. If we are truly effective teachers....

2. “Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.”

3. “Happiness is where we find it, but very rarely where we seek it.”

Sunday 21 February 2016

The Power of Questioning - Part Two

I begin my next series of posts reviewing the book "Questioning for Classroom Discussion" by Walsh and Sattes.

Teachers who learn to ask quality questions, and teach their students to do the same, can transform typical classroom interactions. Cognitive demand increases as students are expected to formulate their own questions, rather than wait for the teacher’s. As they speak and listen to peers they should be formulating questions too. The practice of quality questioning empowers students to engage in challenging forms of open conversation, promotes respect for different points of view and helps to develop new understandings.

J.T. Dillion’s Questioning and Teaching: A Manual of Practice (1988) distinguishes between questions that promote recitation and those that foster discussion. He argues most teachers only do the former. Recitation is the focused on student mastery of core knowledge and fundamental skills, whereas discussion is the arena in which students think critically or creatively about that knowledge. Both types of questions are equally important, but teachers must recognize the differences so they can use them both effectively. If a teacher is giving a formative assessment/ checking for understanding, then questions of recitation are the best choice. This will help the teacher and student understand what the students understand. Questions for discussion help to build or deepen understanding, often occurring after students have mastered core content.

Here are some of the differences in purpose of questions of recitation vs. discussion

Here are examples of questions used in recitation vs. discussion

One of our goals here is to see how quality questioning is a key aspect in lesson planning. This book focuses on ways teachers can use questions to engage students in a deeper and more meaningful way.

The following four practices are associated with quality questioning:

Framing focus questions that initiate and sustain student thinking and interactions.
Promoting the equitable participation of everyone in the discussion.
Scaffolding student responses to sustain and deepen thinking and understanding.
Create a culture that supports thoughtful and respectful discussion.

Questioning Practice # 1: Frame a Quality Focus Questions

Step One - Identify an issue - choose something that is relevant and provocative to engage students emotionally.

Step Two - Craft the question - use age appropriate academic vocabulary, use strong verbs that will get students thinking, use a simple and straightforward sentence structure, and deliver within a meaningful context.

Step Three - Anticipate student responses - Ask yourself, “how high my students respond to this question?” Brainstorm all the possible responses you can anticipate. This accomplishes two things: it is a good check to see if the question can produce a range of perspectives. If it cannot, then it will not lead to a quality discussion. Secondly, it allows the teacher to plan effective moves, either to sustain the student thinking, or in the case of erroneous reasoning, to lead students to rethink their positions. Walsh argues that the main goal “is to develop students’ skills in challenging, extending and even correcting one another.”

Questioning Practice #2: Promote Equitable Participation

This is perhaps the most important and the most difficult aspect of quality discussions. Teachers need to strategize how do accomplish this. The challenge is how teachers can preventer the eager and enthusiastic student from monopolizing the stage without shutting them down and on the other side, how to encourage shy students without embarrassing them? How do you do either of these without interfering with the discussion?

There are no simple answers to this, but Walsh recommends two strategies:

Establish norms and guidelines that foster equitable participation
Use structures that scaffold participation by all.

Teachers must communicate that each student should be prepared to communicate and that students “own” the norms that are created by the teacher. One great step in doing this is to have the students develop the guidelines.

Walsh promotes one norm that is counterintuitive to how most classrooms function - NO Hand raising. Requiring students to raise their hands before speaking leads to a large number of students opting out of the conversation. Teachers should decide who will respond to questions by using random methods for selecting respondents, while engaging everyone.

Here are some good structures for scaffolding equitable participation:

Student trackers - assign a few students to keep track of who has and has not spoken.
Fishbowl - Use a fishbowl protocol where 5-7 seven students sit in an inner circle, while other students sit in a concentric outer circle. Each student in the fishbowl is expected to contribute to the discussion. The students in the outer circle must listen and take notes. They can also be asked to track which students have contributed. It is also good practice to let them have a chance to share one thought after the fishbowl participants have concluded their discussion.
Short-answer round-robin - Ask each student to respond to a question in one or two words. Each student offers a response and has the option of agreeing with a classmate.
Limitations on participation - provide students with a limited number of tokens to “spend” during a discussion. Walsh doesn’t love this as it interferes with the natural flow of the discussion, but he recommends using this in the beginning phase as you develop the class norms.

It is important for teachers to explain to the students their rationale for the structure they put into place. Engage students in reflecting on their own and their peers’ participation. Ask students why it is valuable to hear from their classmates. Expect everyone to take responsibility for supporting one another’s engagement.

In the next post, we will continue with best practice three and four, Scaffolding student responses to sustain and deepen thinking and understanding, and Create a culture that supports thoughtful and respectful discussion.

Links to Interesting Articles:

1. How Students’ Digital Footprints Can Affect Them Long After They Leave Your School

2. How peer video coaching is completely changing how our teachers teach

3. 9 Basic Digital Skills Every Teacher Should Have

Links to Interesting Web Tools:

1. Creating a gradebook in Excel
2. Creating a Digital Portfolio

Quote of the Day:

1. “He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

2. Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein

3. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

Elon Musk

Wednesday 10 February 2016

The Power of Questioning - Part 1

In the next few blog posts, I plan on exploring "Questioning" in the classroom. I am in the midst of reading two books on the topic and hope to finish them next week when school is on break so I can share my thoughts with you. The books I am reading are "The Power of Questioning: Opening Up the World of Student Inquiry" by Starr Sacketsein and "Questioning for Classroom Discussion by Walsh and Sattes. For the purpose of starting this discussion, I reflect on a blog post written by Katrina Schwartz, entitled "How to bring more beautiful questions back to school."

The video below highlights some of the reasons our society tends to discourage questions and encourages answers.

We live in the Google era where everyone can look up answers in seconds. But Google is looking to employ people who ask critical, deep and insightful questions. That should tell you that we need to teach our students to question, question and question more. The good news is that children start off in a state of curiosity and if we just keep encouraging that curiosity, we the rest will be easy. The damage is usually done when people discourage questions.

Why don't kids want to question? Here are few reasons:
1. Questioning may not appear as cool. Kids may view those who ask the teacher lots of questions as suck-ups.
2. Kids who question a lot might feel it makes them appear dumb or less intelligent.

Parents can do a lot to encourage their children to question, but that is a topic for another time. One quick suggestion is when your child comes home from school, instead of asking "What did you learn in school today?" ask "What good question did you or one of your classmates ask in school today?"

To focus on teachers, I have one overarching principle that one of my mentors and teachers taught me. You don't have to answer every question. It is ok for teachers to say to a student, "that is a great question; I don't have an answer, but I will look for one."

Here are five ways Schwartz recommends to encourage questioning:

1. Make it Safe - Kids won't raise their hand in class if they think others will think they are stupid. Fear can kill their curiosity.

2. Make it cool - good questions lead to cool stuff and can make the world a better place. Convince your students of this!

3. Make it Fun - Turn questions into a game to make it more fun and interactive for your students.

4. Make it Rewarding - if a child asks a great question, tell him so. Go home and look for new answers that show the student you are taking his questions seriously.

5. Make it Stick - questions have to be a regular part of your classroom.

Links to Interesting Articles:

1. 3 Things Students Want to Hear from their Teachers

2. 3 Videos on the Importance of Empathy

3. Empathy in the Classroom: Why Should I Care?

Links to Interesting Web Tools:

1. Search by Reading Level with Choosito

2. Pinterest a Treasure Trove For Educators

Quote of the Day:

Friday 5 February 2016

Teaching Students with Anxiety

I recently attended a workshop on “Anxiety Disorders in the Classroom,” and wanted to share some of the ideas and applications that were discussed. The workshop was given by Bev Miller M. Ed. and had lots of great information and practical strategies for teachers to care for students with anxiety.

When non-educators think about what goes into an excellent school, they often miss a key ingredient: the mental health staff and mental health programming. We are responsible to provide a mentally healthy safe school and classroom environment. Teachers and administrators need to learn how to do this just as much as they have to learn about student engagement, classroom management and assessment. If anxiety is not handled correctly, three likely outcomes will be fight, flight or freeze. Some people will react by acting rude or defiant (fight) while others will be very avoidant (flight). Other students will freeze in their trackes, hoping not to be noticed until the perceived danger passes. We need to help students manage their anxiety so they can function as learners in our classroom.

This workshop discussed three types of anxiety: General, Social and Separation.

1. General anxiety - General Anxiety challenges are characterized by excessive worry. Students who have this type of anxiety tend to show the following symptoms in the classroom: Distracted, easily overwhelmed, muscle tension, fatigued, difficult to reassure, headaches, stomach aches, weaker than expected academic performance, social challenges such as volatile relationships, only having a few friends or perhaps being a total loner.
a. Children with general anxiety challenges often complain of self-doubt and worry about
their future, social acceptability and ability to perform at an acceptable level.
2. Social Anxiety - social anxiety challenges are defined by excessive and unreasonable levels of fear regarding social embarrassment or negative evaluation in social situations, which interfere with everyday function. Kids who have social anxiety, tend to show the following symptoms: fear of being humiliated, afraid of judgement or rejection, fear of being called on to answer a question in front of a group, fear of less structured times like recess, assemblies or group activities, and fear of being the centre of attention. Keep a look out for students who ask the teacher to help clean up the room while the other students go out to recess or those that often asked to go to the bathroom at those unstructured times.

a. Children with social anxiety do not tend to respond well to simple reassurances or distraction.
b. It is the teacher’s obligation to help students prepare for these kinds of situations. We can prime them and ease their anxiety to a point that they can function in these situations.
c. In these situations we should look out for students who are speaking very softly or avoiding eye contact with you. They are also more prone to blushing or having a shaky voice. These kids might try to escape into their technology at these times when their social anxiety is high.

3. Separation Anxiety - Separation Anxiety challenges are characterized by excessive, unreasonable and persistent stress associated with actual or anticipated separation from their primary attachment figure that is not developmentally appropriate. This type of anxiety is more typical in younger students. These children make it almost impossible to leave the trusted adult. If this is displayed in children who are 4 or 5 years old or a bit older but new to the school, this would be normal. The following actions would make it appear beyond normal and more concerning: The child being inconsolable, they might become aggressive as attachment figure leaves, or they might engage in self-injurious behaviour as the attachment figure leaves. In older students with separation anxiety, the above behaviours might come out if you take away their cell phone or other important possessions.

a. Knowing when these types of behaviours are signs of serious anxiety is a little difficult for the non-mental health professional. The general indicators to look for would include the frequency, duration, impact and intensity levels.

Thought Distortions

Children dealing with anxiety issues are often prone to thought distortions. Here are some examples:

1. Catastrophic thinking -they always think that the worst case scenario is the most likely scenario.

2. Ignoring the Positive - they feel that anything right they do or anything positive that happens is only a fluke.

3. Negative Self Talk - they constantly speak negatively about themselves.

4. Perfectionism - they tend to never see anything as good enough

5. Mind-Reading - they tend to tell people that they know what they are thinking about them and it isn’t good.

Strategies for Teachers

Teachers are able to adjust activities such that students with anxiety challenges experience less worry and anxiety.

a. When assigning group work, teachers can:

b. Create the groups and deliberately place the anxious student with more patient/kind peers.

c. Create groups with random selection, but deliberate placement of the anxious child.

d. When asking students to go to the board to demonstrate work, have students come in pairs so the anxious child has a supported teammate.

e. When asking students to answer questions, give them the option to “phone a friend.”

There are tons of practical tips that teachers can do to manage their students anxiety. That goes beyond of the scope of this posting, but see below for some good websites to find these strategies.

Websites