Art of Questioning

This week’s article summary is How to Make Your Questions Essential 

The term “essential question” comes from the work of Grant Wiggins. 

In his article below he outlines the criteria of essential questions, which stimulate student inquiry, discourse, and deeper thought. 

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I moved from teaching history from a content to an “essential question” focus—where my students used the content of history to debate questions like  "Are humans innately selfish or selfless’, "Is the study of history about the study of mankind’s continuous progress?", "Is democracy the best form of government?”. 

These were the questions I pondered and debated as a history teacher, and if I found these question intriguing, open-ended, and deep, chances were my students would too. 

There article below provides lots of examples of questions from various grades and disciplines often posed in class and suggestions how to reshape them to generate much more student discussion and debate and higher-level thinking. (I especially liked the “non-essential” question Crustaceans: What's up with them?)

Fostering student thought certainly has its share of ‘art', yet, as the article attests, there is a clear structure, process, and  ‘science’ to designing questions that foster interest and engagement.

In addition, here’s a link to the article 25 Question Stems Framed Around Bloom's Taxonomy which contains a quick and easy reference to various action verbs and sentence structures in all of Bloom’s Taxonomy levels.

Have a great weekend!

Joe

---------

What makes a question essential?

Essential questions foster the kinds of inquiries, discussions, and reflections that help learners find meaning in their learning and achieve deeper thought and better quality in their work.

Essential questions meet the following criteria:

·      They stimulate ongoing thinking and inquiry

·      They're arguable, with multiple plausible answers

·      They raise further questions

·      They spark discussion and debate

·      They demand evidence and reasoning because varying answers exist

·      They point to big ideas and pressing issues

·      They fruitfully recur throughout the unit or year

·      The answers proposed are tentative and may change in light of new experiences and deepening understanding

Often in classrooms, question are convergent, designed to support content acquisition. They either point toward the one official "right" answer, or they elicit mere lists and thus no further inquiry.

Below are some tips for designing “essential" questions.

How well does the draft question meet the criteria?

Writers of essential questions need to develop the discipline of pausing to deliberately self-assess their question against specific criteria. Look at the first non-example: How do good readers use strategies to understand text? The question is leading; it merely aims to remind students of the answer. It asks for recall, not inquiry. A better question might be, Which strategy should I use when I don't understand what I'm reading? By putting the question this way, the student must think about all possible moves and determine which to use in each "stuck" situation. The research on effective instruction in comprehension strategies shows that asking students to generalize their answers helps them become self-regulated learners because generalizations facilitate transfer.

If the question is too convergent, how can I phrase it to invite inquiry and argument? If the question is factual, what question on the same topic is worth arguing about?

Arguments involve unsettled issues of understanding or application—not settled knowledge and skill. We typically find debates not in the content itself but in discussions of its value, importance, or applicability. For example, there's no argument about how to kick a soccer ball, but there are endless debates over when to shoot, pass, or dribble. Here's a question in Language Arts: What is proper punctuation, and why is it important? There's little argument about the first half of the question, and the second half seems likely to limit, rather than expand, inquiry. We can revise the punctuation question to read, When is proper punctuation mandatory, and when is it optional? We can easily prompt debate by looking at poems and social media messages that are not "properly" punctuated and at unfortunate punctuation errors in more formal writing to deepen the inquiry and lead to important general understandings. Rephrase a draft question using sentence stems like, To what extent … ?, In what contexts … ?, How important was … ?, and so on. By doing so, you can turn a humdrum question—such as, Why is World War I important?—into something vastly improved: How important was World War I in shaping the modern world?

Is the question merely engaging? Or will pursuing it lead to the topic's big ideas?

To engage students, some teachers frame an essential question that goes off on a tangent. But a good question has to be more than just intriguing. The best essential questions take you to the core issues and insights of a topic. Our longtime favorite engaging, but tangential, question is, Crustaceans: What's up with them? It's certainly open ended, and it could go in a million directions. But it's unlikely to uncover rigorous, in-depth learning in biology. On the other hand, What good is a bug? more easily leads to deep inquiries into ecology, agriculture, health, and so on. In math, here's a common question: Where do we find examples of ____ in the real world? This question means well, but it leads to the world of things, not to the world of ideas; it will yield only a list of factual answers. There's no inquiry into mathematics. A teacher we worked with wanted to ask, Where in the world do we find examples of similar triangles? After listening to the above argument, he quickly came up with this edited version: How much and in what ways would we most miss similar figures if they didn't exist? Not only is this a more intriguing and arguable question, but it also goes deep into math, opening up an exploration of other geometries besides the familiar Euclidean one.

Is the question general enough to use across other units? Or is it bound too narrowly to just this topic or text?

We want a question that rewards us for revisiting it. Here's a question, based on a reading of one of the stories in Frog and Toad series: How do Frog and Toad act like friends? By revising the question to this—Who is a true friend?—we can connect to varied texts and to personal experience. In addition to making us question the question—What do we mean by true friend?—this revised query recurs over and over throughout our lives, in history and psychology as well as in literature. The genius of Frog and Toad is that sometimes they don't act like friends, which deepens the inquiry. Here's another example showing the virtue of a more general focus. The question, Why did we fight in Vietnam, and was it worth it? sets a more helpful agenda for a history course when we revise it to read, Why have we gone to war? When was it wise, and when was it foolish?

Does the question get at what's odd, counterintuitive, or easily misunderstood? Or is it a predictable question with mundane and relatively superficial answers?

Here are some common questions: What's the difference between fiction and nonfiction? What's a theory in science? What is history? What can numbers help us do? These questions don't lead us very far. They call attention to key ideas, but they don't promote in-depth inquiry. By contrast, successful questions do just the opposite: They highlight apparent paradoxes or counterintuitive investigations. When is fiction revealing, and when is it a lie? If history is the story told by the winners, what stories aren't we hearing? What can't the language of numbers communicate? Misconceptions are a rich resource for such questions.

Am I looking for questions in all the wrong places?

By committing to essential questions as a framing approach, you're planning for inquiry and argument as a priority outcome. Looking only at the content you wish students to acquire is not the optimal way to come up with good questions.To aim for understanding is to aim for three kinds of learning: acquisition, meaning making, and transfer.  A unit on mean, median, and mode asking to just learn to manipulate those three concepts won't develop understanding. The interesting and arguable aspects of those concepts lie in how to best use them—and avoid misusing them. So this question heads in the wrong direction: When do we use mean, median, and mode? Rather, focus on the significance and applicability of the ideas: What's the fairest way to calculate grades? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each measure of tendency? When are measures of central tendency most abused, and how can we defend against such abuses?

The Bottom Line

High-level inquiries and questioning yield some of the greatest gains possible on conventional tests of achievement as well as better student engagement. Getting the questions right takes discipline, skill, and artfulness. But it's well worth the effort to ensure that students tackle inquiries that are important, intriguing, and revealing.