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Steph Harel, explores the journal article ‘Developing enquiry through questioning’

Steph Harel, Acting Head of Geography at WHS, explores the journal article ‘Developing enquiry through questioning’

Wood, P. (2006) Developing enquiry through questioning. Teaching Geography, 31(2), 76-78.

“Any student wising to develop their capacity to enquire geographically requires a clear capacity to question” (Wood, 2006; p. 78).

Many classrooms, and even national strategies, focus on teachers as the main questioners; however, if students are to develop an independence in their work they must gain experiences which allow an opportunity to play a central role in framing questions of interest.

Wood accurately argues that students need to develop their questioning skills if they are to act as autonomous enquirers. His valuable exploration into different ‘levels’ of questioning in Geography highlights meaningful ways in which to support students to develop their own capacity for independent questioning:

1. Simple questioning: Simple questioning games can be used to develop and sharpen students’ questioning skills. For example, when revising a physical geography topic, students are given a post-it note with a keyword written on it, which they stick to their foreheads. Students then pose each other ‘yes’ ‘no’ questions to decipher which process they have been allocated.

2. Questions to compare: Students are asked to develop questions which will produce a clear and detailed comparison. For example, students studying tectonic hazards might explore two case studies, one from an AC and one from an LIDC, and are asked to compare their volcanic eruptions by posing questions. Importantly, students then reflect on why they have chosen their questions.

3. Questions to enquire: Wood uses an example of a KS3 class, who recently completed a unit on agriculture. Students were prompted to consider the underlying patterns and processes they studied and asked to formulate five questions they would use to investigate the agriculture of India. For example, “How does landscape and climate affect farming in India”? I was particularly struck by Wood’s focus on the importance of recognising that enquiry questions can lead to ‘dead-end’ responses, and that learning and understanding is not a simple or linear process.

4. Questions to research: When students have developed a questioning capability, they can be given a large amount of autonomy in both framing and researching questions. Wood explores this idea in KS5 Geography teaching, with students studying the global economy. Students were offered a new context in which to explore the changing economic fortunes of two contrasting locations and the opportunity to decide on questions they felt were pertinent to ask. The process culminated in a written report, which demonstrated deep and critical understanding of the information researched.

As an educator, it is my belief that the geography classroom is an ideal environment for developing the use of self-questioning. I found huge value in Wood’s article, which argues that it is crucial that teachers not only learn how to pose their own questions to greatest effect, but also guide and support students in developing their own enquiries about the world around them. “By focusing on the student as questioner, we can help them become more active, reflective learners, and this can only help in developing active, critical classrooms where quality geography [my emphasis] can blossom” (Wood, 2006; p. 78).

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Alexa Cutteridge reviews ‘The Coaching Habit Say Less, Ask more & Change the Way you Lead Forever’

Alexa Cutteridge, Head of Curriculum PE and Assistant Head of Year 7, gives a short review of ‘The Coaching Habit Say Less, Ask more & Change the Way you Lead Forever’ by Michael Bungay Stanier

 

“We live in the world our questions create.” (David Cooperrider)

“The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.” (Madeleine L’Engle)

“Get comfortable with silence”

“Without a good question, a good answer has no place to go” (Clayton, Christensen)

–

As a PE teacher, I have spent most of my professional career practically coaching on the sports field, but I have been on a journey to bring coaching techniques to my leadership roles, and apparently, I am not alone! As noted in the book, Daniel Goleman (psychologist and journalist who popularised the concept of emotional intelligence) suggested that coaching is one of the six essential leadership styles, but is one of the least used as many leaders claim to not have time to practise it. Stanier guides you through easy ways to change your leadership behaviour, to incorporate a coaching style in a way that you do ‘a little more asking people questions and a little less telling people what to do.’ Stanier considers that it is not initially an easy concept to increase questioning and so he helpfully outlines how to change, before looking at what to change.

The seven coaching habit questions are:

  • The Kickstarter Question – ‘What’s on your mind?’ the way to start any conversation in a way that is both focused and open.
  • The Awe Question – the best coaching question in the world – ‘And what else?’ This works as a self-management tool for you, and as a boost for the 6 other questions.
  • The Focus Question – ‘What is the real challenge for you here?’ This question helps you slow down so you can solve real problems and not just the first problem.
  • The Foundation Question – ‘What do you want?’ This allows you to identify the needs of an individual and get a better understanding how you can support them.
  • The Lazy Question – ‘How can I help?’ This helps cut right to the request and additionally it stops you from leaping into action unnecessarily.
  • The Strategic Question – ‘If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?’ This allows the people you are working with to be fully committed to their yes and aware of the no’s which will create the space and energy for the yes to happen.
  • The Learning Question – ‘What was most useful for you?’ This works with the Kickstarter question to make the Coaching Bookends. It helps to ensure that everyone finds their interactions with you even more helpful.In the educational arena, applying the coaching habit and the simple, yet powerful seven questions, has the potential to positively transform the leadership of Teachers, Heads of Departments, Pastoral Leaders, Senior Management or even pupils on Student Leadership Team. After reading this book, it is important to highlight that I do not think we need to do away with the leaderships styles we already have, but merely bring the coaching habit questions into the mix, in a way that works for us. How does that sound?
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Jamie-Lee explores the Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education

Jaime-Lee, Head of Netball at WHS, explores the journal article ‘Questioning for Learning in game-based approaches to teaching and coaching’ from the Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education

 

Harvey, S. and Light, R. (2015). Questioning for Learning in game-based approaches to teaching and coaching. Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 6 (1): 1-16.

‘Questions that encourage players to reflect on what they have just done will increase learning’.

A Games-based approach is just one pedagogy used in the teaching of PE. It is focused around practice through play, where players learn and refine skills while participating in matches. As skills are not broken down and taught individually, questioning becomes an important part of the learning. In order to achieve a Games-based approach, the PE teacher needs to move away from the traditional direct instruction teaching to open-ended questioning within the game of play.

The Games-based approach draws on 2 theories of learning – ‘The Zone of Proximal Development’ and ‘Complex Learning Theory’. The Zone of Proximal Development looks at focusing questions in the gap between what a player can learn on their own and what they can learn with direct teacher guidance. Complex Learning Theory focuses on the idea that learning is a combination of the mind and body.

Examples of good questioning in a Games-based approach:

  • How are you deciding when it is best to lead for the ball?
  • How could you improve your off-the-ball defence?
  • What is the most important thing to think about when deciding who to pass to?
  • What might happen if you do not receive the ball on your first drive?

Questioning needs to be open and give the player the opportunity to reflect on what they have just done. For players to show skill progression, they need to understand why they were successful/unsuccessful and how they can improve. For example, if a player is struggling to get free on a centre pass, rather than saying, ‘if you dodge it will help you get free’. Try, ‘how can you get free from your opponent?’, followed by ‘what if that does not work?’.

When done well, a Games-based approach allows players to not only make decisions independently but also to adapt to new or changing situations as they arrive. The use of well-constructed targeted questions will increase a player’s knowledge beyond where they could have reached on their own. The key is to ask open-ended questions at a point in play where reflection can occur.

 

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Mr Richard Bristow explores an article from Music Teacher Magazine

Music Teacher Magazine

Mr Richard Bristow, Director of Music and SMT Secondee, explores an article from Music Teacher Magazine looking at the idea of establishing ‘desirable difficulties’ in the way we use questions and approach tough concepts.

‘For music teachers, there are four overarching strategies that are most useful for introducing desirable difficulties into a music education context – recall practice, interleaving, the spacing effect and elaborate & listen’.

Passey’s impressive article quickly discusses some very useful strategies that musicians, working in the classroom, practice room or (eventually!) on the stage, can employ to help our learners overcome struggles and difficulties in our lessons. At the heart of this is often the ‘teacher as expert’ message which can be problematic to our learners, as they can so often see how effortless we, as professional musicians, can make something, whilst they are struggling with achieving the same technique. So much of this is linked to the way we present information. As Passey argues, it is far better for long-term memory to engage learners by active questioning and quizzes than to simply give them the information, where up to 50% of the information gets lost in future recall.

The recall strategy is something musicians use frequently; whether this is leaning specific exercises like scales or learning entire pieces from memory, as many of our scholars and performers at the WHS Young Musician events do. The huge benefit, as Passey summerises, is that finding learning something from memory difficult helps to reinforce the strength of the memory, ensuring the memory remains active and accessible in the future. The questions we ask are central to this; the learner might find playing from the score easier initially, but needs to be encouraged, through questioning, to see the development of their musical skill as being the ultimate goal. 


The discussion on interleaving was also great to read, building on work we as staff have been doing on this in WHS recently, but with the benefit of close subject-specific focus. This involves switching between many different by related tasks, forcing the brain to make links with multiple pathways (‘desired difficulty’) rather than learning something in a ‘massed practice’ way, where the same bar or passage gets repeated over and over, forming a single pathway. I really like the idea of having interleaved practice sessions, where learners switch between playing pieces, exercises and aural skills to see the links between them and develop musical skills. Perhaps switching between instruments would provide even more connection, and I’m now wondering if asking my choir to perform their parts on instruments could really aid their musicianship. Again, the questions we ask form the backbone of creating links and avoiding potential cognitive overload and confusion.

The spacing effect is also another area where musical skill can benefit other subject learning. Long term recall is hugely helped by doing smaller amounts of practice regularly rather than lots of practice once a week. The same is surely true of exercise, and, as we head into Lockdown 2 at the time of writing, is something I am going to try to do more of!

The final passage, titled elaborate & listen, was for me the area that will have the most impact on my teaching, whether in the classroom or on Teams. I really enjoyed the idea of transformative improvisation – where you take an idea and improvise around it – as this is something that is useful to the performer, composer, and musicologist. Extending this by altering the style we perform in (‘try learning this passage of Mozart, but playing it in a Ragtime style’) can also be useful to develop these neurological pathways, and again something that readily transfers from practical performance to composition and the written word. The idea of listening is also vital; when we ask a question, how often do we actually listen to the answer? Sometimes the best question is one that gives the learner space to talk about their experience, vocalising the connections they are perhaps starting to make.

Regardless of the subjects we teach, and how we teach them, the idea of ‘desirable difficulty’ is an excellent one that comes from the questions we ask in our contexts. Celebrating challenge by asking difficult questions and enjoying the journey of learners answering with increased fluency is something to be relished.

 

Article title: An upward curve
Author: Guy Passey
Featured in: Music Teacher Magazine, October 2020 (accessed through the paper mag, not online)

 

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Teaching History

Dr Anna Field, teacher of History at WHS, explores an article from the journal Teaching History and how dialogue in the classroom can create layers of historical understanding

‘1069 and all that: the dialogic understanding of the Norman legacy in Chester’, Teaching History 175 (June 2019)

“…dialogue can be harnessed in the classroom and enable students to create meaningful connections between factual, conceptual, and contextual knowledge.”

Bird and Wilson’s impressive study investigates the role of classroom dialogue in the production and application of historical knowledge across a three-lesson Y8 enquiry on the Norman legacy in Chester. Using methods from sociocultural psychology, the authors argue that the students’ historical knowledge both shapes, and is shaped by, dialogic interaction in the classroom. How this is achieved, they contend, remains an understudied area. While the article’s focus is on classroom dialogue as a whole rather than questioning per se, the authors’ examples of classroom exchange demonstrate the importance of teacher questioning in the creation of explicit and tacit historical knowledge. The result is a carefully planned a well-executed consideration of the interaction between different levels of historical knowledge in KS3 pupils, which further suggests how dialogue can be harnessed in the classroom and enable students to create meaningful connections between factual, conceptual, and contextual knowledge. The authors largely succeed in their aim to shed light on the different ways to create these links.

According to Bird and Wilson, dialogue stimulates interaction and movement between layers of factual, conceptual, and contextual knowledge and thus promotes historical understanding. In the first enquiry lesson, the process gauging students’ knowledge unearthed misconceptions surrounding chronology. While the students could make inferences, it was clear to the teachers that deeper knowledge did not yet underpin those inferences, and was not yet at their ‘fingertips’ during class discussion. Transcripts of dialogue from the next two lessons demonstrated the importance of teacher questioning – ‘probing’ – in how students started to evaluate significance and generate collective knowledge. Teacher questions were guided by student inferences, using an open format that encourages students to use their explicit historical knowledge – facts, dates, events – to develop a tacit understanding of the ideas and beliefs that sources from this period reveal. The trajectory of questions can be traced from ‘wow, tell us more! What we learn from this’; to ‘how can we learn that information [from the sources]?’; to ‘why were they [the Normans] smart?’.

These questions generated a ‘moment of contingency’ in one pupil that guided the whole class to read the primary texts in a specific way. The authors showed that these interactions fostered a deeper and verbally explicit connection between ‘layers’ of historical understanding in the individual and the wider group. In the words of Bird and Wilson ‘in this way knowledge becomes dynamic, changing and flexibly understood rather than inert, static and brittle’, a key quotation which demonstrates the contribution their study makes to History education pedagogy.

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Teaching Backwards

Nazlee Haq, teacher of Maths at WHS, looks at the book Teaching Backwards and what it says about the teacher as detective and the power of metacognitive questioning

 

“Over a series of lessons, students should be asked metacognitive questions. These can be posed at any point in the lesson.”

 

Reduced face-to-face contact with students due to Covid-19 restrictions has highlighted how vital it is to get questioning right in the classroom to assess students’ understanding of the curriculum.

In ‘Teaching Backwards’ we learn that questioning is a tool for “looking for proof of learning”. The role of the teacher detective is to establish the quality and depth of learning that has taken place over a period of teaching. Teachers should also be able to forecast the types of questions students will ask, using the lesson plan as a prompt to do so.

As a teacher you know what you want your students to have learned by the end of the lesson, so that when they are assessed they can demonstrate a clear understanding of the concepts.

The right questions can act as proof as to whether students are on the right track to understanding content. Questions can take several forms:

  • To check for weak understanding
  • To create deliberate confusion to see how students deal with the challenge, although this tangential approach may not be appropriate for all students
  • Ask students to provide evidence for their answers
  • Help teachers to understand whether the students’ thinking process is robust and on track or not

Initial questions might be open, but also require students to provide support for their verbal answers. For example, “Tell me what you have learned so far about …..?” followed by, “Can you provide evidence for ….?”.  By setting this type of expectation in questioning students, Hattie argues that teachers establish academic rigour in the classroom.

However, others have argued individual, pair, group or whole class that giving students ‘wait time’ is also valuable. By giving this allocated time students become increasingly skilled at giving detailed answers, enhancing the quality of their reflection.

Over a series of lessons, students should be asked metacognitive questions. These can be posed at any point in the lesson.

At the start, ‘Have you seen a problem like this before?’. Or during, ‘What part of this is easy/difficult to explain to someone else?’ and ‘What stages are crucial in explaining this concept?’ At the end, ‘How will you remember this learning?’ or ‘If you did this again, how could you do it better?’

I particularly liked this last set of questions as they prompt students to think about how they are working through problems.

 

 

 

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Mrs Wei Fang reviews Kris Boulton’s blog post: ‘Should we use questions to teach?’

Mrs Wei Fang, teacher of Mandarin at WHS, reflects on her own experience of questioning in the classroom, before reviewing a blog post by Kris Boulton ‘Should we use questions to teach?’

 “…the question is not why questions are better, it is when.”

As a language teacher, I have been thinking a lot about questioning in the classroom, getting students to really think about the grammar and vocabulary they learnt, in order to improve their understanding and memorising. For example, ‘how’ questions are particularly useful in assisting students to remember Chinese characters, or hanzi: ‘How do you know the meaning of this character?’ Students would answer: It means juice 汁  because it has water radical 氵 (the components of characters that indicate meaning). I then would retrieve other learning from their long-term memory by asking an elaboration question: ‘Where else can you see this radical?’. Giving students the thinking time, asking them to connect their learning and expecting a better answer are very important strategies of questioning.

However, questions do not always go well. At times I asked a series of questions and felt like my questions were much longer than the students’ answer. They seemed to be confused about why I asked those questions. I then reflected on my lesson and realised that: why didn’t I just explain it?

So, it is time to think about why we ask questions. Kristopher Boulton argues that questions are not necessarily better than explanations, though sometimes he switches to questions when he feels the need to promote understanding. In his blog post ‘Should we use questions to teach? -1&2”, he addresses that the question is not why questions are better, it is when. He concluded that: ‘questions can be very effective tools of teaching, but they must be used with incredible care.’ A very structured grid of various question types concluded by him and another blogger can be found here:

Question Spectrum

The above matrix is made for Maths, but one can be also useful for other subjects. It brought to my attention the pointlessness of allowing students to guess without establishing their prior knowledge. In Mandarin, there is language content that is better to be explicitly taught first, especially the content that doesn’t exist in English, for example: tones, measure words, characters (not randomly drawing it but with certain orders), as well as unique culture conception such as Hukou (a system of household registration used in China), etc. In order to enhance understanding, I once asked year 7 students to analyse the tones, by asking them the differences between Chinese and English sounds. As a result of lacking enough input of Chinese, some students were struggling to tell the differences among the four tones. They told me that the rising and turning tones sound the same. In this case, further questions on this will confuse them. It made all the difference the next time when I made them practice tones for enough time, and then asked them to tell me which tones they have heard and why (verbalizing burgeoning understanding). A key quotation from Boulton that I keep in mind for my subject is ‘never ask pupils questions to which they have not already been told the answer, unless they know enough that answering the question requires them only inching forwards.’

References

Kristopher Boulton

https://tothereal.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/should-we-use-questions-to-teach-part-1/

https://tothereal.wordpress.com/2013/05/29/should-we-use-questions-to-teach-part-2/

https://tothereal.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/never-ask-pupils-a-question-to-which-they-have-not-already-been-told-the-answer/

 

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Mrs Rebecca Brown reviews Craig Barton’s book: How I wish I’d taught Maths

Mrs Rebecca Brown, teacher of Maths at WHS, reviews Craig Barton’s book How I wish I’d taught Maths, focusing on Chapter 11 about formative assessment and diagnostic questions.

“without an effective formative assessment strategy we are in danger of teaching blindly, being completely unresponsive to the needs of our students.”

Craig begins this chapter by referencing the 2013 Dylan Wiliam tweet:

Example of a really big mistake: calling formative assessments ‘formative assessment’, rather than something like responsive teaching.

It’s only a too familiar scenario – you mention an assessment and a classroom (or staffroom!) erupts into a panic of more pressure and visions of tests, marking and grades. But how do we understand what our pupils know and where we need to begin or continue teaching them from? Even more crucial now, following a period of prolonged guided home learning. My key quotation from the chapter is when Craig explains that ‘without an effective formative assessment strategy we are in danger of teaching blindly, being completely unresponsive to the needs of our students’.

Formative assessment should be about ‘gathering as much accurate information about students’ understanding as possible in the most efficient way possible and making decisions based on that’. In short, it is about adapting our teaching to meet the needs of our students.

He describes elements of great teaching and cites one of Rosenshine’s (2012) ‘Principles of Instruction’ -to check for student understanding: ‘The more effective teachers frequently checked to see if students were learning the new material. These checks provided some of the processing needed to move new learning into long-term memory. These checks also let teachers know if students were developing misconceptions’.

Teaching is only successful if students have understood and learned something. Successful formative assessment can help us to identify problems and begin to fix things in the here and now much more effectively and efficiently. Asking ourselves, do I need to go over this point one more time or can I move on to the next thing?

Craig suggests the use of diagnostic questions to give quick accurate and useful information about students’ understanding. A good diagnostic question is a multiple choice, four-part question, with three incorrect answers that can help you to identify both mistakes and misconceptions. Each incorrect answer must reveal a specific mistake or misconception. If the question is designed well enough, then you should be able to gain reliable evidence about students’ understanding without having to have further discussions.

Diagnostic questions are designed to help identify, and crucially understand students’ mistakes and misconceptions in an efficient and accurate manner. They can be used at any time in a learning episode and are most effective when used throughout, using follow up questions to test the exact same skill as the first question.

Craig has developed a website of diagnostic questions that can be used in a variety of subjects. This year I will be trying to incorporate these into all of my lessons to ensure I have accurate, timely information on student understanding to enable me to effectively teach the girls that I have before me.

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Ms Fionnuala Kennedy Reviews: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

Poet, novelist and teacher Kate Clanchy tells her story, and the stories of the children she has met, taught and encouraged, over a 30-year teaching period.

Review

Firstly, I must confess something of a bias: Clanchy was my poetry tutor at college back in 1998, and so, perhaps, I can hear her human and poetic voice especially clearly in this brilliant book. But that fact aside, it is the warmth, humanity and clarity of this insight into teaching which makes this such a compelling read. Clanchy never uses jargon or pedagogical acronyms; she doesn’t talk about effective starters or lesson objectives; rather she focuses on the story-telling aspect of being a teacher, and the people-focused artistry at the heart of what we all do.

This is Clanchy’s story of her experiences teaching over a 30-year career. Clanchy’s story ranges with humour and honesty from the trials and tribulations of teacher training, to first jobs and first mistakes (she talks of those initial months as: ‘A bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper or an acrobat: a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents and occasional sublime flights that leave you either crippled or changed. If you are changed, you are changed forever’), through to her current role as Writer in Residence at the Oxford Spires Academy in Oxford, one of the most multi-cultural schools in the UK where the children speak more than 30 different languages.

Of course, the tangible outcome of Clanchy’s approach is the incredible, moving poetry by her – often immigrant – students whose voices are otherwise marginalised; now, thanks to Clanchy, they are not only confident in that voice, but are published and in some cases award-winning poets. This is a book which stands up for the unheard and the unseen, whether it’s the white, working-class boys like Allen with his ‘blacksmith’s hands’, holding literature away from him because he finds it so powerful, or girls like Amina who must lie about their birthdays for fear of being sent back, or lost, angry Kylie who loses her shoe behind a radiator and ‘can’t get a ruler, and give the thing a poke, because such enterprise is beyond her’.

But it is also a book which stands up for teachers, which puts the importance of teaching front-and-centre, and reminds us to be proud of what we do, and the differences – marginal and seismic – we might make. Sometimes, it helps to have someone say you should feel proud, whether you’re a young student learning to write, or a hardened Deputy Head at the end of January…
It’s not all feel-good and comfortable, though, far from it, and of course for some of the students things don’t get much better. As such, in the writing of this book, Clanchy also serves up a timely and occasionally angry reminder of why education for all is so important, and expresses with courage and fluency the problems which sit within a divided education system. As someone who teaches in an independent school, it reminded me of the importance of our partnerships programmes – of what Clanchy would consider the responsibility of ‘patrimony as well as entitlement’ – and what lies at the heart of the Trust we all serve: to reach as many girls as possible, regardless of background.

Verdict

Five stars.

Most memorable quote

It’s not a quotation, but for impact of writing and Clanchy at her best, read Shakila’s Head pp78-84, which finishes: ‘Does she feel the lighter of it, I wonder, now it is me who has to carry the head home? Or will it be equally heavy, however often it is passed, just as much a head? Well, we can find out. Shakila’s head: the weight of it, the warmth, the cheekbones, the brains. Here you are. Catch.’