Transcript - AI Generated
Promoting engagement and understanding through effective questioning strategies
[0:16] Hi, welcome back. Today, I'm going to be giving you five strategies to use questions that promote engagement and deeper understanding for your students.
The first one is, how do you get better at teaching?
So the first thing I'm going to suggest that you do the first strategy to when you're using questions to help him promote engagement Or deeper understanding right so the first strategy is to stop asking for the right answers Okay, so stop asking questions that are just you know your basic you know which energy system is dominant for this sport or which, What's the right answer to this math equation or you know?
Who wrote this or when did this happen in history or all those kinds of questions, you actually want to move away from that kind of question because that's very basic, that's not promoting engagement, that's not helping to deepen understanding.
Instead you want to ask questions that are seeking for the reasons why something is correct or incorrect.
[1:17] So this gives insight then for you into the reasoning for the student and whether or not they actually understand what's being talked about because there are ways that you can get right answers using the wrong methods and there are ways where you can come up with a seemingly right answer even that's based on a completely poor understanding of the concept and so for example you might ask students rather than saying you know is Romeo and Juliet a tragedy or a love story right rather than ask them that you want to say why is Romeo and Juliet considered a tragedy and not just a love story.
Okay and so the students then are trying to give you reasons for why why is Romeo and Juliet a tragedy right why is it not just a love story because you know there is a love story to it but it's more than that it's a tragedy of a love story and so you know you can ask questions like that where you're just you're looking for the reasons behind the question and so it's really it's really simple way of.
[2:20] Slight changes to the way you ask a question.
It's a simple structural changes where rather than asking You know, is this the right answer?
So yeah is Aerobic training the best training for soccer, right?
You can change that to saying why is aerobic training not?
Necessarily the best training for soccer right and then they might go.
Oh, well, maybe it isn't maybe it is so they're they're going to go through and kind of justify this what they've come up with and it just forces them to it shows you that they understand, right?
It's showing you their reasoning behind the answer rather than just focusing on correct or incorrect.
You're focusing on their process that's happening in the background, which furthers engagement and really helps the students to deepen their understanding because they have to be showing why or how all the time, not just the right answer.
[3:11] So that's number one. Stop asking for the right answer instead.
Look for reasons why something is incorrect or correct or whatever in the background.
Moving away from think-pair-share to write-persuade-present and question
[3:19] Okay, so you're looking for to understand students reasoning and thought processes that they've got The second strategy is instead of using think pair share, which I'm not saying is bad I think pair share has been around for a long time.
Lots of people use it. I would encourage you to instead use write persuade present and question and so the reason why I am going to suggest this is.
[3:45] Thinking happens in your head and often we don't know if we've given students enough time, often students will think and maybe forget about it or often they just sit there in silence because you don't know if they're actually thinking.
So getting them to write the answer down instead is forcing them to think, it's showing you evidence that they're thinking and it gives them something to refer to whenever they then have to engage in any kind of conversation.
Now, the pair is still kind of there, but the pairing now is not just about getting together and chatting, it's about persuading.
And so I've written the stuff down that's in relation to whatever question you've got, and then I'm going to sit with another person, so I'm pairing up, but instead of just chatting about it, my job is to persuade them why my answer is correct or better than their answer.
And so they're going to sit down and they're actually going to try and understand each other's perspectives and then give arguments to each other about which one is best, and then they should decide out of that which one is best.
And you can do that in pairs, you can do that in threes, you can do pairs and then into fours if you want to during this kind of persuasion process.
And it just forces the students to think more about what they're doing.
So they're thinking about the answer, they're writing their answers, they're gonna then think, if they know persuasion is coming, they're gonna write down some reasons for that, and then they're gonna bring that into that conversation that's had with the other student.
[5:02] So writing, persuading.
The next thing is then to present.
And so presenting here, I want them to stand up, I want at least a representative from the group to stand up and present what they came up with.
So this is what we've decided is the best answer, and these are the reasons why.
And they can kind of do that as a group, they can do that as an individual representing the group, I don't mind, but it's about presenting something and then being...
Get the time being given then for others to ask questions about that and so they can other people in the classroom go Well, why did you say this reason and not that you know?
What is maybe is this a better thing that you could do instead of this one?
And he's you know, three reasons why I think that one's better and it's not that they're gonna have an argument But it's about that opportunity to have questions that force them to defend.
Okay, and it's again. It's helped force them to go deeper Okay, it's not just thinking, having a chat and then sharing it with the group, it's now writing something down, trying to persuade someone, presenting it to the group, presenting it to the whole class and then being questioned about what you present. So it forces them to have to go deeper.
Going deeper with student engagement through presenting and questioning
[6:07] They can't just be shallow on that because they're going to get smashed when they get up and present something and everyone's like, ah, you've missed this or what about that or what about this or what about this?
And the students then go, oh, okay, I really didn't do this well, I didn't think this through properly.
And by doing it in a process where it's going from an individual to a group, that should by the end be very strong what they present to the class and you can have people do different questions then and bring that to the group and that then gives this extra layer of depth and thinking to things because they're then considering others.
There can be slight tweaks on the question or it can be completely different questions but all relating to a similar context or a similar piece of content.
[6:42] So this is really forcing every student to engage and it gives them a chance to consider reason and evidence throughout the process and it's really important I think for doing that.
So an example of a question I might use for that is what is the best way to train for 400 metres? So this is me being a PDH PE teacher.
That might be a question I might use. Why is this the best?
And so there you go I think this is the best and then they've got to come up with reasons why, they're going to argue with someone and then they might actually find as a group that they just they change it, they tweak it, they refine it and then they're going to present it to the larger class, who then might ask questions, why is it continuous training?
Why are we having short breaks in between? Why don't we have longer breaks in between, in 400 meters, and then run one 400 meter race and then wait a minute and then run another one, right?
They run one flat out and then they have a break for days before they do the next one.
So what do we really need to work on with that training? So you can go really deep with that.
[7:35] And you can do the same with lots of questions.
So we could go back to that Romeo Juliet question. You can have, all right, kids, I want you to talk about that, write your own reasons for why, chat about it, present it, and then answer questions about it.
That process can work for almost any question as long as the question's not just a ...
What's the correct way of, what's one plus one?
That's not gonna work.
But if you can talk to them about, why is 10 to the power of three equal, why is that not 300?
Right, and then have them go through and go, well, it's not 300 because it's 10 times 10 times 10.
It's not 10 times 10 three time. Like it's not three times 10.
Using questions to promote engagement and deeper thinking
[8:19] 10 times 10 times three, right? That's not the process. And so it forces them to show their reasoning, their understanding, and it forces that further engagement by using right, persuade, present, and question rather than think, pair, share.
The third strategy for using questions to promote engagement and deeper thinking, is to build journaling into your lessons.
So this is essentially building in reflection, right?
So you want to scaffold the reflection process to focus on their growth in their learning, to focus on overcoming barriers, to focus on connecting new and old information explicitly, right?
So if they go, we'll ask them, what things did you learn this week?
And they can write that down and go, okay, how does what you learned this week connect to what you learned a month ago?
And then they can flick back in their journal and look at what they've learned and go, oh yeah, it connects here and it connects there.
And that helps them to actually cement their knowledge in their head.
It helps them to reflect and see how they're progressing.
It's really good for long-term learning, long-term memory.
And then you can also embed in that journal questioning type stuff, some real-world applications, how might this be applied to your context or into, you can be specific or a bit more general in that as you create this process.
But it's just about helping our students to reflect, helping them to think about their learning explicitly, that whole metacognition processing, how does the new and old connect is really, really powerful for our students when they're looking to cement that long-term.
Journaling for reflection and long-term learning
[9:46] Memory. That's what long-term memory.
So, when I do this, you might do this once a week, or maybe once a fortnight, depending on how often you've got them.
You wanna give them about 20 minutes to do this. Don't give them five minutes, it's not enough time to really do this well.
You wanna give them plenty of time, a good solid block, where they can do this and engage with it.
You could scaffold these, or you could kinda leave it a bit more open if you want, as they get older and get more used to it.
But you wanna, you could even use, there's a thing called learning dispositions wheel, and it talks about different areas of learning, so your ability to use resources to connect with people and hold each other accountable, to contribute to groups, to think critically about things, your ability to research and to find good pieces of information, and that kind of stuff.
They all fall into this kind of learning depositions wheel. So you could embed some of that stuff too in there, have them reflect on those and identify ones that they're improving and which ones they're already doing well in, which ones they still need to improve later, that kind of stuff.
But building that kind of journaling process into the learning that's happening in your classroom will help to promote the engagement of your students and deepen and cement that understanding that they've got.
Exposing assumptions and exploring different perspectives
[10:56] Okay the fourth strategy is to expose assumptions.
Okay so have students explore and write down their assumptions in relation to open-ended questions.
[11:07] And so this here is just about getting two things behind how they're going to go about approaching something.
So you know if you're doing Shakespeare Students might have the assumption that Shakespeare is old and dead and hard to understand and so that's their assumption and then they need to think about how that might impact what they're doing as they engage with Shakespeare and whether it be Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet whatever it is.
We want to make sure that we're helping the students identify their assumptions as they try and analyze something because it helps them to go deeper with their thinking particularly around open-ended questions that are presented to them.
So you can talk about the impact of Shakespeare, or you could look at anything in history even, and have the students think about what are their assumptions when they come to historical texts.
[11:54] When you look at the history of Egypt, are these hieroglyphs written on the wall? What are your assumptions about them?
What are your assumptions about Egypt? Were they a great civilization?
Were they not a great civilization?
[12:05] What about their culture, and how do you go about thinking about that?
All kinds of things can come into that and just getting their students to expose those assumptions and that then will lead them to see how their assumptions impact the thinking and the answers they're coming up with and so then they can go you can then pair them up with someone who has a different set of assumptions and that would help them both to gain a deeper understanding by looking at something from multiple perspectives and so that multiple perspectives helps the students go deeper on the topic they're looking at because they've identified their assumptions and the other person's assumptions, and you know their predispositions I guess for lots of things as well so really helping our students to, see their assumptions, right, to expose them, let them be open before they then go about the whole process.
And particularly it would be good if they're going to do like a big research type process, right?
They're going to identify what are their assumptions that they have going into this, and so think about analyzing a novel, right?
If they've read the novel, they have read it from a particular perspective, and they can write down some of their assumptions about some of the characters that are in there and that kind of stuff, and then they can talk to the other person who has different assumptions about those characters, and then interpret key events in the book and the storyline based on the perspectives of those different assumptions and how that's impacted the reading of the novel. And you can do that to lots of things.
[13:27] Okay so as I was doing that I actually already impacted on the fifth one which is to pair students with different perspectives.
Okay so they can be real perspectives or they can be made up kind of case study scenario based perspectives.
So you can say that I want you to take the perspective of a young single mum who has a child but she's 20 and she's got two children under the age of three.
This person over here is 75 years old all their children are grown up.
This person over here is maybe they've got an immigrant who's come from another country so you could pick any of the other countries really but they're immigrant who's arrived recently and we're going to talk about this particular scenario and you can have them all get into this group where they're each presenting and arguing from the you know the character that you've given them to kind of act out in that discussion to force that deeper understanding by looking at different perspectives or you can just get real perspectives so if you know that different kids have different perspectives on particular topics sit them together and have them actually try and understand each other because that's this is one of the key things in, this process is that they're not sitting there to argue they're actually coming together so that they can understand each other's perspectives and by understanding other people's perspectives it should help them to actually get a deeper understanding of whatever it is that's being discussed and so they can then look at how it impacts their own application of the content.
[14:53] It can really open their eyes to the fact that their kind of assumptions and stuff are impacting what they're looking at and how they're interpreting things.
[15:04] Okay so that's five. I am going to give you six though. I did say I was going to give you five, but I've got a sixth one that I want to mention.
And that is to ask why five times. Okay so one of the things that happens is that students and even us, when we ask why we kind of go one level deep.
We go okay here's the answer, this is why, this is my why.
But if you actually keep asking why, so why is that your why, why is that, why is that, it forces that deeper, right, really diving in deeper for how things work, or diving deeper for why things are important, and forces that greater level of justification around things, the better ability to evaluate and critique.
So it helps students to get to the root causes of concepts, to the roots of topics or events that have happened, you know.
Why was the assassination of this person so pivotal in maybe starting World War I or something, you know. And so they could then look into that and then go, well, why, why?
And so they can look into the further and further into the background of what's going on. And that really forces them to go deeper with everything.
[16:10] Okay, so I've given you lots of strategies there.
So it was meant to be five strategies to help with your questioning, to engage students, to help them to go deeper. I've given you six.
So they were, you know, to look at the reasons, right? So you're asking questions now to find the reason behind the answer that students are coming up with.
You want to help students to write things, persuade people, present and question instead of think, pair, share. So write, persuade, present, question.
When I start getting our students to maybe do some journaling in response to some questions, reflecting on things, help them to identify assumptions in relation to the questions that get asked, help them to see a question from multiple perspectives, and then asking why five times.
And all those things will help your students to go deeper.
It will help your students to engage more in the learning that's happening and hopefully improve their overall learning in your classroom.
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