Guiding Deeper Questioning
No doubt, since my last article, your mind has been boiling over with BIG questions. Waking at 2am in the morning, tuning out your loved ones, investigating the most curious things as your mind ticks over the opportunities for learning in the real world. Perhaps your team has crafted a big, open-ended and “ungooglable” question to pose to your classes. Having just finished showcasing an elaborate performance where students were able to express their school values through the arts,
my team are looking ahead to 2020, excited about exploring how our students might build strategies to overcome future challenges.
Let me share with you our approach to unfolding the immense amount of learning that lies within a big question, in a way that lets students take ownership and learn how to learn.
In order to answer essential questions, students must first understand their complexity. This is where teaching about questioning, as I have written about in an earlier issue, is key.
A question matrix is a great tool to use in a range of contexts to establish this foundation understanding. With this knowledge built, we are able to begin each inquiry with a conversation which flows similar to the following:
Teacher:Can we answer this question straight away?
Students:No.
Teacher:Why not?
Students:It is too complex. It isn’t googleable. It requires me to form an opinion first. I need to know more about some of those words before I can understand how to answer it.
Teacher:Then how can we go about answering this question?
Students:We need to break it down into manageable parts. We have to form smaller questions about each keyword. We need to understand the different parts of the question and then put it all together. We need to understand the parts before we synthesise.
From this quick start to the learning journey, the students need a tangible and visible way to illustrate the processes that are required to begin big question deconstruction, or decomposition if you want to relate it to digital technologies. They need to know how to break into manageable parts that they can attack systematically, creating layers of learning that get deeper as they progress toward finding a complex answer.
Teaching at a school which is striving to grow self-directed learners, my biggest challenge has always been for students to tell me where they need to go next in their learning and
to easily understand their thinking process. Over time, I have refined a thinking tool perfect for this job. Our staff and students know this as the ‘Cloud Melt.’ Classrooms each have their own laminated clouds and individual raindrops ready to record smaller questions that melt out of the big one, as well as the success criteria to help explicitly teach the skills involved in the process.
Using the cloud melt consistently, repetitively and across a range of curriculum areas, has resulted in a process that students can transfer with fast growing competency and independence. Upon entering any class or conversation with a student about their inquiry learning, the cloud melt is the anchor to which students and teachers can refer to, to successfully communicate the purpose of their current learning activity.
Learning Coach: What are you learning about?
Student: I am learning what a robot is.
Learning Coach: How will defining what a robot is help you in your learning?
Student: The big question I want to answer is
if a robot will take over my job in
the future so it is important to know
what defines a robot first. I need to
know what sort of robots there are and then I will be able to find out what all those robots can do. I will use that information in the synthesis stage of my learning, but for now I am just building my knowledge.
From Year 3 to 13, we have used the Cloud Melt as a whole class with the teacher modelling, students contributing as a group, small teacher facilitated workshops, scaffolded one-on-one tutorials, collaboratively in student lead groups, as a think-pair- share and with an expert student guiding a class.
As students have become more proficient in forming smaller questions, they are learning more independently and teachers push for deeper thinking with extension success criteria such as colour coding to connect similar questions.
Our students are now beginning to choose their own formatting: from maneuverable drops on a digital document, whiteboard tables, modelling books and raindrop cutouts to a sketch in their books. The possibilities are varied and can easily be personalised. In fact, when the students get bored of the melting cloud, they may wish to embark on a rainbow pooping unicorn, a slime dripping monster or an illustration to match the theme of their big question for a show stopping wall display. Although the creative in me is disappointed when senior students begin adaption to the dreaded list of smaller questions, perhaps with a raindrop bullet point, I can only smile at the visual I know they hold in their heads and their ability to break down a question in such an effective and proficient way.
A cloud melt will result in a series of smaller, more manageable questions that don’t seem so daunting or difficult when they are isolated. They should be a mixture of questions that require the building of content knowledge and those that require student’s own thinking and answering the big question should essentially be the synthesis of all the smaller questions where students make connections.
Following a cloud melt, in a process called mapping the learning journey, I teach students how to categorise the smaller questions so they can place them in a logical order that creates their current and next steps. I will share this progression in the next Teachers Matter Magazine.
As always, I set you the challenge of trialing what I have shared. Use the success criteria to teach your students how to break a big question into smaller more manageable parts. In fact, try it with your teaching team before presenting it to the students and compare notes of what worked well when you put your individual spin on it in your own classrooms. Perhaps you will find your own illustration or metaphor to personalise the cloud melt to your own school environment. Share your successes and challenges with me using #cloudmelt and we can continue to support each other along the way. And if you have forgotten about the genius in explicit teaching of questioning, revisit my earlier article on Blowing up a Question to help set students up for a successful meltdown.