Student+Inquiry+and+Labs

Jason’s approach use in the glow stick lab is similar to this. These six steps may be a format for many of our labs to start getting students to “use intelligent behaviors to solve problems.”

Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions http://hepg.org/hel/article/507#home

When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, deepen comprehension, and make new connections and discoveries on their own. However, this skill is rarely, if ever, deliberately taught to students from kindergarten through high school. Typically, questions are seen as the province of teachers, who spend years figuring out how to craft questions and fine-tune them to stimulate students’ curiosity or engage them more effectively. We have found that teaching students to ask their own questions can accomplish these same goals while teaching a critical lifelong skill.

The QFT has six key steps:

Step 1: Teachers Design a Question Focus. The Question Focus, or QFocus, is a prompt that can be presented in the form of a statement or a visual or aural aid to focus and attract student attention and quickly stimulate the formation of questions. The QFocus is different from many traditional prompts because it is not a teacher’s question. It serves, instead, as the focus for student questions so students can, on their own, identify and explore a wide range of themes and ideas. For example, after studying the causes of the 1804 Haitian revolution, one teacher presented this QFocus: “Once we were slaves. Now we are free.” The students began asking questions about what changed and what stayed the same after the revolution.

Step 2: Students Produce Questions. Students use a set of rules that provide a clear protocol for producing questions without assistance from the teacher. The four rules are: ask as many questions as you can; do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; write down every question exactly as it was stated; and change any statements into questions. Before students start generating their questions, the teacher introduces the rules and asks the students to think about and discuss possible challenges in following them. Once the students get to work, the rules provide a firm structure for an open-ended thinking process. Students are able to generate questions and think more broadly than they would have if they had not been guided by the rules.

Step 3: Students Improve Their Questions. Students then improve their questions by analyzing the differences between open- and closed-ended questions and by practicing changing one type to the other. The teacher begins this step by introducing definitions of closed- and open-ended questions. The students use the definitions to categorize the list of questions they have just produced into one of the two categories. Then, the teacher leads them through a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of both kinds of questions. To conclude this step, the teacher asks the students to change at least one open-ended question into a closed-ended one, and vice versa, which leads students to think about how the phrasing of a question can affect the depth, quality, and value of the information they will obtain.

Step 4: Students Prioritize Their Questions. The teacher, with the lesson plan in mind, offers criteria or guidelines for the selection of priority questions. In an introduction to a unit, the instruction may be, “Choose the three questions you most want to explore further.” When designing a science experiment, it may be, “Choose three testable questions.” An essay related to a work of fiction may require that students select “three questions related to the key themes we’ve identified in this piece.” During this phase, students move from thinking divergently to thinking convergently, zero in on the locus of their inquiry, and plan concrete action steps for getting information they need to complete the lesson or task.

Step 5: Students and Teachers Decide on Next Steps. At this stage, students and teachers work together to decide how to use the questions. One teacher, for example, presented all the groups’ priority questions to the entire class the next day during a “Do Now” exercise and asked them to rank their top three questions. Eventually, the class and the teacher agreed on this question for their Socratic Seminar discussion: “How do poverty and injustice lead to violence in A Tale of Two Cities?”

Step 6: Students Reflect on What They Have Learned. The teacher reviews the steps and provides students with an opportunity to review what they have learned by producing, improving, and prioritizing their questions. Making the QFT completely transparent helps students see what they have done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then apply it in many other settings.

When teachers deploy the QFT in their classes, they notice three important changes in classroom culture and practices. Teachers tell us that using the QFT consistently increases participation in group and peer learning processes, improves classroom management, and enhances their efforts to address inequities in education. As teachers see this happen again and again, they realize that their traditional practice of welcoming questions is not the same as deliberately teaching the skill of question formulation. Or, as one teacher put it: “I would often ask my students, ‘Do you have any questions,’ but, of course, I didn’t get much back from them.” In his seven years of teaching, Muhammad also encouraged his Roxbury students to ask questions but had seen just how difficult that could be for them. After using the six-step process outlined above, he was struck by “how the students went farther, deeper, and asked questions more quickly than ever before.”

One Significant Change For teachers, using the QFT requires one small but significant shift in practice: Students will be asking all the questions. A teacher’s role is simply to facilitate that process. This is a significant change for students as well. It may take a minimum of 45 minutes for students to go through all the steps the first time it is introduced in a classroom; but as they gain experience using the QFT, teachers find that the students can run through the process very quickly, in 10 to 15 minutes, even when working in groups.

The QFT provides a deliberate way to help students cultivate a skill that is fundamentally important for all learning. Teaching this skill in every classroom can help successful students to go deeper in their thinking and encourage struggling students to develop a new thirst for learning. Their questions will have much to teach us.

Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, codirectors of the Right Question Institute, are the authors of the forthcoming book Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions to be published in September 2011 by Harvard Education Press.

For Students, Why the Question is More Important Than the Answer []

In a traditional classroom, the teacher is the center of attention, the owner of knowledge and information. Teachers often ask questions of their students to gauge comprehension, but it’s a passive model that relies on students to absorb information they need to reproduce on tests.

What would happen if the roles were flipped and students asked the questions?

That’s the premise of the Right Question Institute and a new book by its co-directors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana. The book, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions, documents a step-by-step process to help students formulate and prioritize questions about nearly everything.

Coming up with the right question involves vigorously thinking through the problem, investigating it from various angles, turning closed questions into open-ended ones and prioritizing which are the most important questions to get at the heart of the matter.

“We’ve been underestimating how well our kids can think.” Rothstein said in a recent discussion on the talk show [|Forum]. “We see consistently that there are three outcomes. One is that students are more engaged. Second, they take more ownership, which for teachers, this is a huge thing. And the third outcome is they learn more – we see better quality work.” On the teacher’s part, the role becomes more a facilitator than an instructor. “What happens is the teacher plays a different role,” Santana said. “They lead students into thinking. The process of teaching students to ask their own questions allows teachers to communicate what they need to around curriculum. The difference is that the students are thinking and doing more, rather than the teacher.” Rothstein and Santana call their method the [|Question Formulation Technique]. The idea is that if students are engaged in deciding what question to answer they will also be invested in discoveringthe answer. Both teachers and students say the method has been both empowering and difficult. Kids who had long been struggling in school said they felt smart, the authors said. It’s a bit like the Socratic method flipped on its head. Socrates wandered around Athens asking questions to get at a deeper truth. Since then philosophy and law teachers have used questions as a way to get students to think more deeply, rather than giving them the information directly. The Question Formulation Technique turns that dynamic around and asks the students to come up with the questions that speak to the core of a topic. The quest is for the question, not the answer. If the concept feels a bit opaque, the book lays out a step-by-step process for guiding reticent students along the Socratic path, even laying out potential road blocks and work-arounds, which were developed over years of trial and error. In the end, students develop higher order thinking skills that will help them make decisions and think for themselves in any situation throughout life. Santana calls these “foundational skills” that are rarely taught formally, even though they are used all the time. An [|excerpt of //Make Just One Change//] below lays out rules for students to follow as they produce their first set of questions. The questions are focused around what Rothstein and Santana call the “Question Focus” or “QFocus.” This is a guiding topic for the questions that students should be producing. //Rule 1: Ask As Many Questions as You Can (Gives License to Ask).// There are a number of potential stumbling blocks related to this rule, including: //Rule 2: Do Not Stop to Discuss, Judge, or Answer Any Question// (Creates Safe Space and Protection). Students want to answer a question as it comes up. This rule says it all: do not stop to answer, judge, or discuss. Let students know that there will be opportunities for discussion and addressing the questions in other steps of the process. //Rule 3: Write Down Every Question Exactly as It Is Stated// (Levels the Playing Field So All Questions and Voices Are Respected.) Sometimes it will be difficult for the scribe to keep track of the question and all the words. The challenge is to make sure each question is captured, especially if there’s a flurry of questions. Remind students that the whole group is responsible for each question to be written exactly as it was asked. Group members can help the scribe in remembering and recording all the questions. //Rule 4: Change Any Statement into a Question// (Insists on the Discipline of Phrasing, Asking, and Thinking in Questions, Not Statement). Potential challenges that may arise with rule 4 include:
 * **Students struggle trying to produce the questions:** Give them time to think. Repeat the QFocus and the rules but do not give examples of questions.
 * **Students ask for examples:** Do not give examples. Repeat: //Do not give examples.// When you give examples you are setting direction for the questions. Students need to struggle with this a bit. If they are completely stuck, you can use question starters. For example: “You can start a question with words like //what, when// or //how//. Use one of these words to produce a question about [our QFocus].” Question starters will be a good strategy for when students are stuck or when they have produced very few questions.
 * **Groups are working at different pace:** While some of your small groups will have lots of questions, others will not. This is fine. The work during this exercise should not be judged by the number of questions students produced. If some of your groups are slow in producing questions, just make sure they stay on task by reminding them of the rules.
 * **Some students are not participating or one student is producing all the questions:**Remind students about the task and the rules. All group members should contribute questions including the scribe. Remind students of this first rule. All questions are welcomed and valued which will allow the reluctant student to participate.
 * **Students get off task and start talking:** Make sure students stay focused on asking questions. Sometimes you will see students getting off-task — talking or discussing. other times they might think they have asked a question when they have not, using statements or even phrases rather than questions. If you see any of these happening just ask them to change what they were talking about or the statement they wrote into a question.
 * **Students are confused about the instructions:** Confusion could be a result of requesting students to work differently. Repeat the QFocus and the rules to clarify but do not overexplain.
 * **The QFocus is not working:** It is important to have a backup plan if the QFocus doesn’t work. Plan alternative ways to present the same QFocus. Do not try to explain or give information about the QFocus but give the instructions in a different way. “I want you to ask questions about [alternative QFocus].” Explore with students what is it that they don’t understand; this will allow you to restate the instructions in a way they understand.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ** Question Formulation Technique (QFT) ** **Rothstein, D. & Santana, L. (2011). ** QFT is a step-by-step process that helps students learn how to produce their own questions, improve them, and strategize on how to use them. Using the QFT requires that students ask all the questions. The teacher’s role is simply to facilitate that process. QFT can be used to introduce students to a new unit, to assess students’ knowledge to see what they need to understand better, and even to conclude a unit to see how students can, with new knowledge, set a fresh learning agenda for themselves. The technique can be used for all ages.
 * What is it? **

It provides a deliberate way to help students cultivate a skill that is fundamentally important for all learning. Teachers tell us that using the QFT consistently increases participation in group and peer learning processes, improves classroom management, and enhances their efforts to address inequities in education.
 * What is the purpose? **

The QFT has six key steps:
 * How do you do it? **


 * Step One: Create a prompt **

The most effective prompts for this activity are statements that are focused clearly enough so that there is a direct link to the purpose of the lesson and are neutral enough so that students feel free to respond to the prompt. Many teachers use prompts that begin with stems such as “Your role/task is to…” or “You want to / A group wants to.” A prompt could also be a description of a class project.
 * Step Two: Students generate questions **

 In groups, give students a fixed amount of time (5-10 minutes) to generate a list of questions, adhering to these rules: 1) Write down the questions exactly as they are said 2) Do not stop to discuss or answer the questions 3) Write down as many questions as you can 4) Statements should be rephrased as questions.
 * <span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;">Step three: Students identify open and closed questions **

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;">Ask students to look at their lists and put an “O” by all of the open-ended questions (questions with many possible answers) and a “C” by questions that elicit one answer (a “yes/no” question or a question with a factual answer). Then, have students change one of their open questions into a closed question and one closed question into an open question. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;"> **Step four: Students prioritize questions**

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;"> Have groups select 3 questions from their list. It could be the three questions they find most interesting or important or the three questions that they think need to be addressed first. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;"> **Step five: Groups share questions**

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;"> When groups present their questions, ask them to share why they selected these three. The questions that the class generates can be used as the focus of a class discussion, a writing assignment, a research project, or as a tool to help you plan future lessons. <span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;"> **Step six: Reflections**

<span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;">Give students the opportunity to reflect on this process by writing in a journal and/or through a brief discussion. <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;">[]
 * <span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;">How do you learn more? **


 * <span style="font-family: Tahoma,sans-serif;">Rothstein, D. & Santana, L. (2011). Make just one change-teach students to ask their own questions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press **



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Publication Date: September 20, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1612500994 | ISBN-13: 978-1612500997 The authors of Make Just One Change argue that formulating one’s own questions is the single most essential skill for learning and one that should be taught to all students.

They also argue that it should be taught in the simplest way possible. Drawing on twenty years of experience, the authors present the Question Formulation Technique, a concise and powerful protocol that enables learners to produce their own questions, improve their questions, and strategize how to use them.

Make Just One Change features the voices and experiences of teachers in classrooms across the country to illustrate the use of the Question Formulation Technique across grade levels and subject areas and with different kinds of learners.