"Dad, how do engines work?" "Mum, where do babies come from?" "Grandma, why do you have so many wrinkles?" "Mr. Sparks, why does the light shine?" "Josie, why do you have an innie and I have an outie?"
We teachers have become very good at giving answers to their questions. And asking closed questions to see whether they have learned what we have told them. We have become "knowledge tellers", content experts, the sage on the stage and the font of all wisdom, which many of today's interactive kids regard as "totally boring".
But we also use questions to control behaviour. The threat of embarrassment when they give the wrong response (think Pavlov's dogs). So kids look stupid in front of their peers. And shut the heck up, to stay out of trouble.
No wonder kids stop asking questions.
But what if we could capitalise on this early thirst for knowledge. And get kids to ask fabulous questions and discover the knowledge for themselves, like inquisitive scientists or mathematicians.
It's what business is doing. Shifting the work to the customer. We happily push a trolley around a supermarket to fetch the groceries ourselves. We now get cash from automatic teller machines. We book hotels, hire cars and flights on the Internet. In some eateries we serve ourselves.
What I have in mind is for kids to REALLY teach themselves. Design the lessons. Facilitate workshops. Act as mentors. Help others. Work things out for themselves. Discover knowledge for themselves.
And they can do it very well. A decade or so ago, I was silly enough to co-invent a team learning system comprising a bunch of keyboards and some software that turned a single computer into a group computer. The idea was you asked a series of questions. Everyone brainstormed their ideas, worked out what that all meant. One person operated the computer, everyone contributed.
We found that when you string a series of these rich, open ended questions together, you create thinking or decision making tools you can use over and over again. Not just for problem solving, feedback, SWOT analysis or project plans. But for almost any kind of classroom lesson.
We discovered that really fantastic teachers do this already. They arrange for kids to work in small groups and think/discuss their way through a sequences of questions until they get a result. What something means. How something works. A decision. A plan. A solution. A big idea. A new model. A theory.
Next we discovered kids beat teachers hands down at crafting open-ended questions. Seventy percent of teachers failed the task first time. Why? They are so used to asking closed questions they cant compose an open-ended question if their lives depended on it.
Here's a method for creating question sequences:
1. Describe a topic/issue in five words or less.
2. What is the context for the learning activity? Discipline, focus, age and experience etc.
3. What will/could excite, engage or amaze the learner?
4. Make a list of all the ideas/concepts/facts we would like the learner to discover.
5. Make a list of all the ideas/concepts/facts we could expect the learner to already know.
6. Craft open-ended RICH questions that explore the topic in engaging/amazing ways. Include scaffolds, rich language etc.
7. How will we organize the questions into a logical sequence that builds knowledge as the learner goes? Begin with what we know.
Rules for crafting great questions/activities:
1. Socially relevant question e.g. The person sitting next to you tells you they have a contagious disease. What questions should you ask?
2. Open-ended e.g. Thinking about all the different times you have looked up at the sky and all the different colors you have seen. What colors were they and what was happening at the time?
3. Playful - If you could be a fairytale, cartoon, movie or TV character, who would you be and what would you be like to live with?
4. Contains cues- If you were a doctor working in in-vitro fertilization, what kind of patients would you see, what problems would they have and how could you help them?
5. Incorporate a checklist or scaffolds - Write a critique of the painting from the point of view of a person helping the artist to develop their technique. Think about style, tone, texture, materials, colour, etc.
6. Set some rules for success - Complete the series A1, B2 C3......Z26. The winner is the first to finish and the most, accurate in every way, commas, capitals, spaces, numbers and letters.
7. Pictures or documents - Use a picture or a document as a focus for the activity. Create questions to analyse the picture or document.
8. Simulations - Find simulations, e.g. www.worldtime.com or www.howstuffworks.com that can be interrogated by your question sequence.
9. Case studies - Write a series of case studies and ask the participants to explain how they would respond to each situation and why.
10. Arrange questions like a game - Arrange the questions in ascending order of complexity/difficulty starting with the learner's tacit knowledge. Build feedback into every second or third question to give positive feedback about earlier questions. See picture above.
No comments:
Post a Comment