Independent Learning Projects – The importance of Rich Questions
Posted by: markwoolley in Conference Presentations, In Our Classrooms, QuestioningI have been working with a couple of schools this year where students are engaged in year long independent learning projects. These schools have engaged students in learning more about areas that they are passionate about but the two experiences offer me an opportunity to compare and contrast their approaches.
Having just visited one schools final presentations last night I became intensely aware of the importance of questions, rich open ended questions that challenge and extend the students. Without fail, the students who extended themselves and really engaged deeply with their subject area were the students with the rich questions leading to significant learning experiences.
Michelle Shearman presented a superb short session at the Apple Schools Technology Day about her experiences with a year long research project. One of the key features of her implementation of the project was her focus on “Rich Questions”
I guess the best way to summarise the importance of questioning is to quote Michelle
“Rich Questioning = Rich Thinking =Rich Understandings”
You can view Michelle’s abbreviated interactive presentation from the ASTD below. Just click on the “screen” to progress the show. You may need a little patience while it loads. Michelle can be contacted at mshearman@maryimmac.woll.catholic.edu.au .
There are a number of comments about questioning and its importance at the end of this post. If you can’t see the comments please click “here” or on the comments link to the right of the presentation below and continue the dialogue.
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November 13th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
I believe that the purposeful and powerful integration of ICT tools in education is highly dependent on the planning and implementation of quality learning and teaching experiences. These learning experiences are in turn dependent on many critical factors- one of these being the element of QUESTIONING.
In a technological world, where many answers can be simply found with the push of a key…….we need to move our students beyond this, to a place where they not only have to gather information but have to work with this information to develop new understandings; the way to do this is through QUESTIONING.
Our students need to be exposed to rich QUESTIONING, in a classroom climate that encourages and rewards the curious ……as Jamie McKenzie says…… children need to know that ‘curiosity did not kill the cat’. Our students need to experience deep questioning techniques and be explicitly taught how to formulate open-ended, probing , challenging questions that inspire them to move beyond the mere copy and pasting of the ideas of others.
To QUESTION is to think ………and to think is to fashion new understandings from gathered information.
What do you think?
November 13th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for taking the time to add to this discussion Michelle.
From my experience your point about answers being only a click away is the key point. Only when teachers are fully information literate will they entirely understand the importance of setting questions that require students to work at the higher levels of cognition.
The world has changed, access to information quick and easy and as teachers if we don’t challenge our students with “open-ended, probing, challenging questions that inspire them” we lose our opportunity to accelerate and extend their learning.
November 14th, 2006 at 10:00 am
Our whole approach to quality learning and teaching must be guided by our own ability not only to ask the right questions of our students, but to direct them along the path of developing the right questions for themselves.
Our role as teachers and librarians is to educate our students to become lifelong learners, and what better way to do this than to help them learn how to ask the question which will allow them to find the answers they are after. If the students are exposed to deep questioning techniques, and are taught how to develop open-ended questions which are probing, and challenging them to think and explore beyond the obvious, what valuable skills we are offering them!!
Let’s always keep an open mind ourselves, for we too must continue to develop our own questioning techniques.
November 14th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Sue, I really like the way that you write about the importance of getting our students to develop the ability to ask the ‘right’ questions. As Postman says “Once you have learned how to ask relevant and appropriate questions , you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.”
I have also found with the students in my class that the levels of motivation increase significantly when students have the opportunity to formulate their own questions to guide their learning journeys. As Jamie McKenzie writes “Great questions spark our curiosity and sense of wonder.” Visit: http://www.fno.org/sept96/questions.html for more great info on questioning.
November 15th, 2006 at 10:07 am
Thanks for adding your comments Sue, particularly about developing lifelong learners. As teachers we tend to value learning and in turn, be quite good at learning.
Developing this love of learning in our students is possibly the biggest challenge we face as educators and any strategies that move us in a positive direction are important.
My mind is open, do you have any other gems to share??
Michelle, thanks for the link and comments, its always nice to hear of personal experience and successes.
For those who may not have visited Jamie McKenzie’s questioning website you will find a host of quality thinking and resources related to questioning. http://www.questioning.org/
November 16th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
As a participant of the ASTD this year, I found Michelle’s presentation to be quite fascinating. Developing a year long research project appears to be a great way of getting students to really engage in learning. The fact that they need to ask rich, open ended questions ensures that they are not simply looking something up and copying it into a word document or pasting it on a piece of cardboard which is so often the case when students are challenged with typical questions for a project.
The fact that they are deciding what they will learn about also allows them to become excited about learning. I would say from my experience as a classroom teacher, stage supervisor and computer co-ordinator, that half the battle we face as teachers each day is motivating students to engage in the curriculum. Once we have achieved this it is so much easier to keep students interested and learning.
As a computer co-ordinator, who is responsible for ensuring that computer technology is integrated effectively into the curriculum, I know that simply presenting students with computers to research or produce some sort of presentation is not enough. We need to show students how to be life-long learners. We have to encourage them to be inquisitive and demonstrate the skills necessary to find the information they are looking for using many types of media.
I look forward to using some of the ideas I got from Michelle, and other presenters from ASTD, in the classroom, so that students will be more actively engaged in learning and becoming critical thinkers who take the initiative in learning.
November 23rd, 2006 at 7:07 pm
I couldnt agree more Stuart. Good luck with your critical thinkers and I look forward to hearing about or even better, seeing the results!!!
November 27th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
This reminds me of the article by Marc Prensky titled ‘Engage Me or Enrage me’ – we need to make sure our students are engaged, motivated to learn, and allowed to take responsibility for their own learning. We do our students a huge injustice by underestimating their ability to make decisions about what, and how, they learn. Take a look at the article, found at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing. Scroll down to ‘Engage Me or Enrage Me’.