300 to 0. These numbers have captivated me recently as I have been pulling research, data, and strategies together for our Inquiry PLC at CSRA RESA. According to Warren Berger - a self-proclaimed "Questionologist" and author of "A More Beautiful Question," children ask around 300 questions a day by the time they are 4. In the same time frame frame, they ask about 40,000 questions in total. These questions are mainly questions for learning, like: "Why is the sky blue?," "Why does thunder come after lightning?," and "Why do people have different colors of skin or hair?"(A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger: http://amorebeautifulquestion.com/)
By the time children enter adolescence, however, they ask very few to NO questions a day for the purposes of learning. As a high school history teacher, I definitely recognized this trend as students were more interested in what I thought they should know rather than asking me questions about something in the content that interested them. In fact, getting them to ask probing questions could be quite difficult. How can our students develop appropriate answers to historical questions if they cannot develop a good question?
In my Inquiry PLC's, we normally begin with Questioning as this is the basis of Inquiry, and as the research shows is one of the most under-emphasized skills in the classroom. Think about it - what are students rewarded most for in the classroom outside of good behavior? Correct answers.
As History and Social Studies teachers, we need to encourage student questioning. Allowing and encouraging questioning of our content is engaging, helps develop historical thinking skills, and allows students to make connections. Additionally, questioning (along with developing a claim and supporting that claim with evidence) is what historians do!!! Questioning is an essential Historical Thinking Skill.
We can teach our students how to ask good historical questions and we can get them to use questioning for learning in our classes in a variety of ways. There are two instructional strategies, however, that can really help teachers and students - The Question Formulation Technique and I See, I Think, I Wonder. Instructions for these strategies, along with videos to help explain them, are attached below.
Two strategies that can help teachers introduce questioning to students are:
1) I See, I Think, I Wonder - from Harvard University's Project Zero "Thinking Routines": https://goo.gl/lQUyUl
2) The Question Formulation Technique - developed by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana and discussed in their book "Make Just One Change": https://goo.gl/kPrhd5
Both of these strategies have a variety of benefits:
1) They help the student analyze text, artifacts, art, or other sources in totality.
2) They engage students in analysis through discussion and questioning.
3) They allow students to build or access background knowledge before a new topic is introduced.
4) They are "low-risk"activities which encourage all students to participate. Many teachers comment on how impressed they are with how involved the students become in the activity and the quality of their observations and questions.
5) They can be used in all content areas, not just Social Studies/History.
6) They can be modified to be done as a whole group, in small groups, in pairs, or individually.
7) They can be formative assessments of what they students already understand and what they need more help with.
8) Questioning strategies lead to students making inferences, a skill that the GA Milestones Assessments show is lacking in many of our students state-wide.
Several districts in our RESA have rolled out these strategies in their K-12 Social Studies classes this year! The feedback has been incredible! Teachers say that their students are making connections, becoming more collaborative, asking probing questions, and are generally more interested in the content when they use these strategies.
If you go to our "Strategies" Page on this website, you can see examples of these as well as get the directions to them. If you would like help using them in your classes please e-mail me (cparten@csraresa.org) - I would love to help you!
Below, CSRA RESA Social Studies Teachers practice the QFT and I See, I Think, I Wonder at trainings in March and June 2017.
