Peer Teach Week 6 (KB): Questions, Questions and More Questions

Questions, Questions and More Questions...

By: Matt and Colleen (KB Session)

            How can we, as educators (or future educators), place more emphasis on student-based questioning?  How can we get students to take their questions beyond obvious answers?  What strategies can we use to help them not only come up with deeper lines of questioning but to be cognizant of their questioning?

            Imagine that you’ve been presented with an image that conflicts with what you already know.  You begin generating questions.  What is clearly understood about this image?  What meanings are imbedded in the image?  What sort of questions do you have?  Do your questions have answers that are concrete, that resolve the conflict?  Are your questions open-ended, without resolution, leading to further inquiry?  Distinguishing between convergent and divergent questioning is a metacognitive skill and one of the goals of this weeks article on “Question Finding” (Ciardiello 2003).  Consider, as well, a text that conflicts with your prior knowledge. Again, you may have questions.  What is the author’s intention?  Has the author made assumptions on your behalf?  Do you have other interpretations of the text?  Can you find meanings different from what is apparent?  Do you find the text misleading?  Where does the search for meaning in our literacy end?  What is the ultimate goal?  These are the kind of questions that generate from a critical text inquiry, and this is the other goal of Ciardiello’s article.

            Ciardiello has presented two strategies for promoting inquiry and critical thinking in classroom: Discrepant Images and Critical Text Inquiry.  Both seek to elicit thinking that is deeper than that involved in standard question / answer scenarios.  Here the questions are student generated, a constructivist approach, and ideally open-ended.  Both strategies put the students in control when it comes to making meaning and both place the responsibility of interpretation on the students.  Ciardiello has made a clear case for his methods and supports his case with reasonable and appropriate examples from his classes.  We found the sound nature of the article and the broad scope of possible applications exciting. We can see opportunities for either strategy in most if not all grade levels and disciplines.  We did notice, however, that special attention would need to be paid to the knowledge that students will enter these experiences with.  Do students have enough prior knowledge to generate questions about the image or the text?  Will they be able to develop a deeper inquiry about this subject? Does this discrepant image or text relate to what they are learning? If not, can it serve as a springboard to a new, relevant topic?

            The “Reading Comprehension in Science” article (Kinnibaugh, Shaw 2009) will play a part in our peer teach for the coming week. The QAR strategy could compliment a discrepant text or be modified to work with images as well.  We liked the attention paid to comprehension in science where the expository text remains dominant.  We hope to keep everyone busy with questioning this week.