Literacy engagement is a direct determinant of literacy attainment. However, identity investment is equally important. Students will actively engage with literacy only when that engagement is identity-affirming. Thus, if students are seen by teachers, and consequently come to see themselves as not being particular bright academically, they will tend to disengage from academic effort because such effort simply reinforces and identity of incompetence in this sphere. Identity Texts, page 31
1. Decide on the purpose of the question
Why are you posing the question?
To prompt deeper thinking or because you and your students need to ‘cover the ground’?
To illicit a range of responses or a achieve specific response?
To assess security of understanding or reinforce existing knowledge?
To find out what you need to do next in your teaching or to reassure yourself that you can stick to a fixed plan?
N.B. There is no judgement on any of these suggested purposes. It is just a way to reflect on whether questions are ‘fit for purpose’
2. Construct the question
How can you use a thinking framework, a taxonomy or a graphic organiser to design your questions? For example, inference squares, 8-way thinking, 5 Ws, Bloom’s, De Bono’s hats, SOLO, P4C and so on are all great tools to construct quality questions, develop deep thinking and foster curiosity.
Who’s question is it? Do all the questions come from you? How do you design opportunities for students to ask their own authentic questions?
3. Deliver the question
Who will you ask what questions and at what stage of the lesson do they need to be asked for greatest effect?
When will you use your deliberately planned ‘Big Bang Questions’ (BBQs) and what questions can you rely on as your standard ‘go-to’ questions to ‘scatter’ throughout the lesson? How can you deliberately design lessons in response to students’ questions?
How will you pose your questions? What ways can you deliver your questions in a creative and engaging way? In what ways might you be able to use technology to deliver your questions for you, using apps to animate your questions and surprise pupils as the lesson progresses. Just one example, ‘Talking Animals’ is great for this but there are loads of different ways to animate your questions.
How could you design learning so that questions are presented as clues hidden and slowly revealed during the lesson or placed around the room or site, or give them to pupils for them to make their own meanings collaboratively?
Will you be the sole questioner or will you delegate some questions to be asked by students, groups or as individuals?
4. Wait for the answer
How we you ‘grow the thinking gap’ . That is the time between the question being asked and the answer being expected? There’s a load of research about the power of such wait time, but here’s one nice summary from the Independent Thinking Blog.
5. Respond to the answer
What will you do with the information that comes back to you in response to the question you have asked? Handily, this links back to the first element of questioning expertise, “What is the purpose of your question?”
How will you respond to inaccuracies in understanding? What kind of inaccuracies are you likely to encounter? How will you use these as critical teaching moments ‘CTMs’? How will you handle the completely unexpected response? What will you do if your question illicit nothing but the ‘tumble weed’ effect and how will you adapt your teaching to address a whole-scale misunderstanding or lack of confidence with the learning?
You can’t be creative unless you’re in control of what you’re doing and can get better and better at things.(…) I can’t play the piano and I can’t be creative on the piano because I can’t control it. I can be expressive to a degree, I can bang out some notes that will make me feel better but I might as well throw rocks on the wall, I’d feel better doing that. Sir Ken Robinson (source)
Sir Ken Robinson‘s remark on creativity makes perfect sense. It reminded me of a workshop with Pie Corbett I attended some time ago. According to him, children can not become good writers unless they follow a rather logical storymaking process: by familiarizing themselves with the genre through storytelling or rereading; by innovating, re-using a well know text and substituting, adding, altering and / or changing a point of view; and finally inventing and creating a text based on the previous two steps. I have witnessed the effectiveness of talk for writing in my own classroom where a child who used to write a few vague, shallow paragraphs to writing two pages of vivid, detailed events and descriptions.
The same could be said about creativity and the quality of teaching. Following Robinson’s premise, one could claim that teachers can only become outstanding practitioners once they have mastered the basics of teaching and learning and can then innovate and create in order to maximize learning.
Learning is a journey and being creative is part of it.
Bilingualism and Language Education Professor Ofelia Garcia from City University New York delivers the keynote speech ‘Reimagining bilingualism in education for the 21st century’ at NALDIC’s 17th Annual Conference on 14 November 2009 at the University of Reading.
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