Building Powerful Learners Unit 5

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to:

• explore how learners might become not just better learners but effective lifelong learners;
• engage your learners consciously with the ideas and processes of their own learning.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become skilled in developing your students’ learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

• Essential Read …essential must read text.
• Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

Unit 5 explores the “how” of building questioning.

• What are the key aspects of questioning? (Essential Read about 1)
• How confident are my students now as questioners? (Find out 1)
• How could I embed building questioning into my teaching? (Find out 2)
• What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
• Find out more about Visible Thinking Routines. (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so is your fifth step in becoming a skilled learning power practitioner.

Understanding and making use of a widening range of questions to satisfy our need to know what or why or how etc. is an important life skill which is arguably more important today than ever before. In negotiating an increasingly complex world our tendency to question needs to be further sharpened and enhanced.

A well formed Questioning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

• Want to find things out;
• Actually go about finding things out;
• Have the strategies for searching for answers;
• Make sure answers are valid;
• Be brave about asking difficult questions;
• Have strategies for coping with getting under the surface of things;
• Learn to be comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty;
• Not be afraid of the ‘don’t know’ state of mind.

Being willing and able to ask appropriate, searching questions is as much about how we deal with this emotionally as it is about having the practical strategies to do it. Being able to question, seek a range of possibilities and be sufficiently open minded to actively consider alternatives is a critical aspect of becoming a resourceful learner.

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick look back to what you discovered in Unit 3 about Questioners in your class.

Through the lens of the Questioning progression chart you should have a fairly clear view of the questioning behaviours that your students do, and do not, currently exhibit.

• The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
• You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
• But some students will appear to have made more progress than the majority.

A word of warning.

While you may be tempted to focus your efforts on the majority for greatest impact, you’ll need to take care not to do so at the expense of your ‘grey’ students, as these are your potential underachievers in the future.

What to look for.

In Try Outs 1 to 5, look out for teaching ideas that you think will have the greatest impact on your particular group of learners. Don’t attempt to try all of the ideas – better to do a few thoroughly than to adopt a scattergun approach.

Culture is the curriculum of the classroom, frequently hidden from the external observer, but always all too evident to learners. It is the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day way that learners come to understand their role as a learner. Culture is the enacted values of the teacher, not the espoused ones – it is the shadow that the teacher casts in the classroom in terms of what they do do and what they do not do, what they say and do not say, what they believe and do not believe, what they value and do not value.

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage questioning.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

• ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
• the sort of language you might use to stimulate questioning
• ideas for constructing lessons to build questioning
• ways of celebrating questioning

Ask yourself which of the features of the questioning-friendly classroom are:

• already a consistent feature of your classroom?
• an occasional feature of your classroom?
• rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

At this point it might be worth having an informal chat with some of your colleagues. Is anyone already making progress with one of the features you would like to work on? Do you have any consistent features that others might learn from? Take your completed sheet to discuss at the meeting at the end of this unit,

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Questioning.

Begin with the ‘stop/avoid’ box – if any of these teaching behaviours are still in evidence in your classroom it would be worth thinking through how they can be eliminated, since failure to do so will undermine the changes you are hoping to achieve for your learners

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for questioning towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for questioning (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop questioning (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how questioning can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Build in Wait Time

Let students think it through for themselves

What we should do. Research suggests that the optimum time that teachers should wait after asking a closed question relating to factual recall is approximately 3 seconds. For an open question that requires a more elaborate response students should be given around 10 seconds of thinking time.

What we actually do Research into the actual wait time that teachers give students before accepting an answer is closer, on average, to 1 second, irrespective of whether the question is closed or open.

In other words, students aren’t being given sufficient time to think things through for themselves. Q&A sessions become an exchange between teachers and the intellectually fleet of foot and/or impulsive students. Students who want or need time to think it over and come up with their considered answer are denied the opportunity to do so.

A tough question: How long do you routinely give your students to think through an answer before they give it? Are you one of the 3 second / 10 second teachers, or have you lapsed into pursuing pace at the expense of giving time for thought? Most teachers won’t know the answer, but it might be worth finding out!

A challenge – ask a close colleague to monitor the time that you tend to give students to respond to your questions. If you find that you are in the 3 second / 10 second group – great! But if you find that you are giving too little time for student responses, you might consider how changing your practice might improve your students’ responses.

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge curiosity. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging students to think for themselves.

10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

1. That’s an interesting/insightful question.
2. What questions did we ask last time?
3. You might find it useful to try and predict what you think will happen.
4. Could you speculate about the possible results and solutions.
5. What sort of questions might help you get a bit further with this problem?
6. Do you believe that? Might there be more to it?
7. A closed question might focus your search.
8. How can you get to the bottom of this?
9. A hypothetical question might help to stimulate your ideas.
10. How can you phrase that so that you don’t upset people?

The Question Formulation Technique

This intriguing technique has been developed by the Right Question Institute over several years. The technique puts students into the driving seat of asking their own questions. It helps students to learn how to produce their own questions, improve them, and think how best to use them. During this process students practice divergent and convergent thinking and metacognition (thinking about thinking). When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, have deeper comprehension and make new connections and discoveries on their own.

The teacher begins the technique with a sharp enough hook to start the students’ questioning process. In brief the process goes like this;

• Stage 1: Produce Your Own Questions
• Stage 2: Improve Your Questions
• Stage 3: Prioritise Your Questions

For yourself this activity can be used for two purposes.

1. to introduce your students to the idea of questioning being a useful learning behaviour.
2. to inform yourself of your students’ current questioning skills.

Present students, in groups of 4/5, with an image in the centre of a large piece of paper. Invite them to ask as many questions as they can about the image, following the rules below. [The image, or artefact, could relate to an existing or upcoming project, or as a stimulus for creative writing, or any part of your curriculum – anything that will intrigue and generate lots of questions.]

Stage 1: Produce your Questions

Four essential rules for producing your own questions:

• Ask as many questions as you can;
• Do not stop to discuss, judge or answer the questions;
• Write down every question exactly as it is stated;
• Change any statement into a question.

Stage 2: Improve Your Questions

Categorise the questions as closed – or open-ended:

• Working together, categorise your questions as either closed (C) or open (O);
• Agree if any of your open questions would be better if they were closed, and if any of your closed questions would be better if they were open;
• Change any of the questions from one type to another in light of the above discussion.

A reminder. A closed question is one that can only be answered with a limited set of options. Yes/No or single word answers. Open questions are questions that encourage detailed answers and cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”.

Stage 3: Prioritise the Questions

• Choose your three most important questions:
• Why did you choose these three as the most important?

Ask students to prioritise their questions for the job in hand [project or creative writing]. Prioritisation will differ according to the lesson plan in mind.

This causes students to compare their questions and assess which will be most helpful. They also begin to sequence the questions; which would need to be answered first before others could be even considered. Looking at the sequential nature of the questions – e.g. for a story – that offers a possible storyline.

By this point, having observed your students, you will have a clear idea of which questioning skills are alive and well or are not secure.

Reflection Point: How can I design lessons and activities that will enable my students to ask questions in a wider range of contexts?

Have students work out a hierarchy for their learning goals for classroom display

Invite students to categorise the following statements into 3 groups for a classroom display

1. basic questioning skills
2. developing questioning skills
3. higher level questioning skills

• I ask closed questions to gather factual information.
• I can tell the difference between open and closed questions.
• I ask questions when I want to find something out.
• I am good at finding information on the internet.
• I ask open questions to encourage others to tell me what they think.
• I think about how I am asking questions to make sure I don’t upset anyone.
• I am not afraid of asking questions in class.
• I ask ‘what if . . . ‘ type questions to explore possibilities
• I ask myself if the answer is true and if it tells me what I need to know.
• I can use a book index to help me find information.

Could you change each of these statements into an If / Then target, which can then become the basis of the Learning Goals display?

NB. You first met If/Then targets in Unit 2 Try out 1. Take a look back to find out/remind you of how.

Introducing Visible Thinking Routines

You met the Visible Thinking Routine ‘See Think Wonder’ in Try Out 4. You can find out more about Visible Thinking Routines here, further examples of which you will find as you move through this programme.

Visible Thinking Routines are simple routines that apply across a wide range of subjects and contexts, and which require students to think or behave in a variety of different ways. When you use them regularly they become woven into the fabric of the classroom culture and progressively hard-wired into the thinking practices of your students. They become part of the learning culture.

Unit 5 Suggested meeting agenda

1. Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
2. Discuss what you have found out about students use of questioning (15 mins)
3. Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
4. Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
5. Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)