Journey Summary
In this session, you will unpack strategies that promote higher-level learner questions in the classroom. You will begin with an activity that employs the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) to explore how to improve questions that can guide inquiry. Next, you will consider the Spectrum of Inquiry and its relationship to student questions. By the time you leave, you will have successfully analyzed lesson tasks that promote student questions and begin to design a task for your own classroom to be used as the basis for an inquiry lesson.
Curriculum-framing Questions
Essential Question
- When might questions be more important than answers?
Unit Questions
- How can student questions encourage curiosity and drive deeper learning?
Content Questions
- What role do student questions play in inquiry-based learning?
- What are some strategies for helping students ask more and better questions?
- What is the Spectrum of Inquiry?
- What is the relationship between student questioning and the Spectrum of Inquiry?
Introduction
Creating a classroom environment where students learn to ask good questions and know how to organize questions to guide inquiry can produce opportunities for the learners to construct meaning and deep understanding from their inquiries. Exploring strategies for supporting students in asking and answering their own questions leads to deeper inquiry and learners who can learn independently.
Theory Behind Practice
All eMINTS materials are grounded in research-based best practices in K-12 education.
Digging Deeper
Agenda
- Opener
- Option 1: Speed Sharing
- Option 2: A Question Simile
- Option 3: Driver’s Permit Granted
- The QFT in Action
- Questioning and the Spectrum of Student Inquiry
- Inquiry Task Analysis
- Writing an Inquiry Task
- Closer
- Option 1: Schools and Creativity
- Option 2: What’s Your Record?
Classroom Visit w/Students
Ask your facilitator to help you complete a questioning strategy with your students or model a questioning strategy for you. Alternatively, complete a questioning strategy while your facilitator collects data and have a reflective conversation following the lesson.
Classroom Visit w/out Students
Work with your facilitator to complete your inquiry task or to plan a lesson that embeds student questioning. Participate in a planning or reflective conversation about using the QFT or other questioning strategies.
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