As a teacher, I didn't know how to ask questions well! I had basically no training. But I asked hundreds each day. Now, I'm renovating my embarrassingly bad old questions!
A few techniques I found myself using as I renovated old questions from my classroom.
Beware one-off questions. Any question that we prepare should have a natural follow-up question. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
With some small changes, we can turn fluffy opinion questions into thought-provoking evaluation questions.
When I look back at the questions I asked students, one thing really pops out. I did not try answering my own questions. As a result, my students got untested rough drafts.
We had a pack of animal flashcards. But my kid can already read. So here’s how we took these low-level cards up to Analyze – in three different ways.
If you want students to memorize, you can’t aim for memorize. You have to aim higher – and then memorization comes along for free.
It looks like a fun puzzle. But it’s actually just a low-level worksheet in disguise!
Here’s what happens when we make a scaffold the final product.
These “discussion questions” highlight so many of the problems we’ve been looking at.
Let’s do more than ask, “What did this person mean?”
It’s really fun to take an already good sequence, tweak it, and get something even better!
My students were stuck telling me a story’s problem and solution. Let’s get thinking!
How to add a couple of Analyze-level tasks to this Synthesize activity.
I asked my students to re-write a poem line-by-line. WHY?