Questions to ask when planning for deep learning

“How does this particular lesson fit within the larger enterprise of understanding I am striving for? Teachers can then begin to focus on the goals of a particular lesson: With which ideas do I want students to begin to grapple? Where are the complexities and nuances that we need to explore? How can I push students’ understanding and move it forward? With these questions answered, teachers are ready to identify the source material and the kinds of thinking that might best serve the exploration of that material. Only then are teachers in a good position to select a thinking routine as a tool or structure for that exploration.” – “The Power of Making Thinking Visible” Ron Ritchhart & Mark Church - Page 7 p4

The process for planning for learning is undoubtedly challenging. It is a process that requires us as educators to balance and respond to multiple and frequently divergent pressures. It is a juggling act. On the one hand we have the demands of the curriculum. In this air between our hands, we have the needs and interests of our students, the demands of standardised assessments, community expectations, school and system pedagogical models, and cross-curriculum priorities to name just a few of the balls we are juggling. Our aim is to bring all of these into a cohesive whole. But where do we begin and how do we judge what matters most?

When we approach this task with key questions in mind, we focus our thinking on how we might plan learning experiences and opportunities that will have the impact we desire. These are the sorts of questions Ron Ritchhart encourages us to ponder as we plan the lessons we will teach. The questions shared in the paragraph above invite us to consider how the lesson we are planning for will fit within “the larger enterprise of understanding”. Thinking about this matter of the larger enterprise of understanding is a crucial step if we are to plan for an arc of learning that has real bite but thinking at this scale is not always the norm. 

In a teaching for understanding framework, teachers are encouraged to develop understanding goals in multiple flavours. At the largest scale, there are course through lines. These are understanding goals at the scale of the significant understandings at the heart of a discipline. In Science, students should develop across their years of learning an understanding of the scientific method. In History, the concept of change is an inescapable, recurring theme. A level down from these are the unit long understanding goals which communicate the essential concepts to be unpacked throughout a unit of learning, and these are developed through more compact understanding goals that might be achieved through a lesson or short sequence of performances that the students engage in and with. The key is to be clear on what these understanding goals are, what they look like, how they fit together and how they might be achieved. 

The questions that Ron and Mark invite us to engage with are rich with possibility. They invite us to consider the three key pieces of the puzzle of how understanding goals are best approached. There is a question for identifying how the learning intention in front of us for this lesson fits into the longer-term goals we have for our learners. There is thinking about how we begin and an important focus on the ideas that our students will begin to grapple with. After all, learning is a consequence of thinking, and as Dylan Wiliam:

“The crucial thing is that teachers are involved in a creative act of engineering environments within which learning takes place. Teachers are responsible for creating those learning environments but you cannot do the learning for the learner.” - Dylan Wiliam

There is consideration of the complexity involved and the levels of nuance that comes with all learning. Surely if we hope that our students will achieve deep learning, we must engage our students with learning that offers depth and thus we must have developed in our minds a conception of where the deep learning lies. Finally, there is consideration for how we will push for understanding. 

What is crucial is that we consider these questions before we approach other aspects of the planning process. Yes, we will consider pedagogical moves. We will plan for the thinking that our students will require. We will plan a rich range of learning activities and use a variety of stimulating resources. We will utilise a variety of learning scaffolds, and these may include routines for thinking. We will consider learning intentions, and we may publish these for our learners to digest as they learn. We will do all of these things, but we will do them with our eye always on the larger enterprise of understanding that we are striving for. 

by Nigel Coutts

Maximising student questions in the time of COVID19

In this time of COVID19 and remote learning or emergency distance learning the value of encouraging students to investigate their questions should not be forgotten.

We learn via the questions that we ask and we expand our collective understanding of the worlds in which we live through the questions that we discover. Human knowledge is a historic journey of wonderings that have sparked imaginations and a desire to understand. If there is one thing that separates humans from other species it is our deep-seated desire to understand why things are the way that they are, natural curiosity coupled with the capacity and tools to seek answers.

Our natural curiosity is, however, a fragile thing. Much has been written about the decline of our propensity to ask questions with some sources stating that we peak at age four (Right Question Institute). In 'A More Beautiful Question’ Warren Berger explores this in detail and shows that a confluence of factors including immersion in an environment that feeds learners with facts, a focus on right answers not questions and even low tolerance of questions from educators are at play. Look at the curriculum of any major educational system and you find the knowledge that students are expected to learn as a result of their schooling. From curriculum content come lessons aimed at translating that prescribed subject matter into learner knowledge and the scope for questions is curtailed. Time-poor teachers have little time to cover questions not directly related to the curriculum and even questions related to the content are unlikely to be given much importance as the course materials will by design ensure students encounter the answers whether they are asked or not. 

Curiosity is poorly served by answers. This is a crucial point to understand in this time of remote learning. Undoubtedly our students’ minds will be full of questions at the moment. Questions about the nature of the pandemic, questions about their future, questions about the changes occurring in society and questions about their safety. Beyond this, they will continue to have questions connected to the learning they are engaged in. How we respond to these questions set the tone for how our children will relate to and connect with knowledge. If we provide them with neatly packaged answers they are likely to believe that knowledge is something which is given to you by a more knowledgable other. If we respond instead with questions, prompts and nudges that encourage inquiry we set the conditions for a mindset in which knowledge is gained through a process of exploration, inquiry and investigation. When we encourage our children to self-navigate their way towards answers we enable them as agentic thinkers and set them up as life-long learners.

Great teachers are highly skilled in the arts of facilitating inquiry. They use their knowledge of their learners, their understanding of the subject matter and effective questioning to transform a student’s question into a fruitful investigation. From actively listening to the student’s question they plan their next step. They ask “What makes you think?”, acknowledge the child’s question, share an interest in the search for an answer, suggest a possible starting point. They form a partnership in a search for understanding and through this, the child learns how to learn rather than a quick answer.

The enemy of this style of learning is always time. The temptation to quickly answer the question is compelling for many reasons including some linked to the ego of the respondent, but the most significant obstacle is typically a lack of time. The process of supporting a learner move from nascent question to the framing of a powerful question for inquiry (an essential question of guiding question) and then onwards through the process of investigation and the formation of a conclusion is lengthy. The challenge of time is likely to be even more pressing for parents who are finding themselves picking up the role of the teacher during this time of emergency remote learning. 

'It's the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer all he gains is a little fact but give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers. That way, when he finds the answers they’ll be precious to him, the harder the question, the harder we hunt, the harder we hunt the more we learn, an impossible question . . .’  - 'King Killer Chronicles’ by Patrick Rothfuss

The idea of a teacher responding to a students inquiry with a question is one that might be quite foreign to many of our parents. It is likely that their experience of schooling involved the teacher as a source of knowledge. The teacher knew things that they needed to learn and the role of the student was to absorb this wisdom. Teaching was and is seen by many as an act of communication of knowledge from one mind to another. Even if the parent might communicate an understanding that this is no longer the case they may have limited experience with education as a conversation between two inquiring minds. Between a lack of time, a belief that their role as an adjunct educator is to answer questions and limited knowledge of how to foster curiosity with effective questions all means that we may find students missing opportunities for inquisitive exploration. 

Engaging in some creative questioning at home can lead to some wonderful dinner time conversations. "Creative Questions” is a thinking routine for developing ideas and for training your mind to think differently. Instead of responding to a simple question with an answer, the use of some powerful questions can transform the question into an inquiry. Questions like this might help:

• What makes you say that? or What makes you think that? or How do you know that?

• What are you trying to do? State your objectives using absolutely no jargon.  

• What is the problem?  Why is it hard?

• What questions does that raise?

• What evidence do you have?

• What is missing?

• Where do you go from here?

• What part of the problem is left?

• What are you certain about? Why?

• What would it be like if . . .

• How would it be different if . . .

• Suppose that . . .

• What would change if . . .

• How would it look different if . . .

This situation is likely to be exacerbated if the learning that we are planning for our students is largely bound to content knowledge. If we are sending home packets of worksheets full of closed questions where there is one correct answer and one well-established method for finding it we create little room for anyone to engage in meaningful inquiry. Now, as always, is a great time for open-ended questions with multiple possible answers and a broad spectrum of approaches to finding a solution. This is also the perfect time to allow students to investigate their questions. In times of such great uncertainty, allocating parts of their week to self-initiated inquiry might be the perfect way to win back a sense of agency. 

What manner of questions should we encourage our students to ask? If we are to encourage out of the box thinking and innovative ideas we must provide opportunities for students to ask questions that connect their interests and passions. If our students are always asking the questions we have imagined for them, or worse still that the textbook writer imagined, when do they get to imagine their own questions? Dr. Richard Curwin explores this in a blog post titled ‘Questions Before Answers: What drives a great lesson?’ Curwin explains the need for lessons centred on a question so engaging to students that it gets under their skin and compels them to inquire. I will argue that the most compelling questions are the great questions our students bring with them.

Consider a typical lesson as a dialogue and then look at this dialogue from the perspective of the teacher and the student. Often it goes something like this: The teacher begins the class either stating or implying that “At the end of this hour you will know . . . or ‘at the end of this hour, you will have discovered x, y & z’. The student hears this and thinks politely to themselves ‘why don’t you just tell me now’ or ‘if I can learn this in an hour how important can it be’ or ponders that favourite of all questions for students to ask ‘why do I have to learn this’.

At the end of the lesson the student does indeed know the new fact or idea, they can parrot back an answer so they must. The teacher is happy and the lesson is deemed a success. At the end of the day the student goes home and answers the question 'what did you do in school today?', they answer ‘not much’ for them the lesson was a failure. Why?  For the student there was no learning, they acquired a new fact but that fact had no value because it was never linked to a question that mattered to them. It was not their question, it did not engage their interest and they just had to play the game to get to the end of the lesson where the fact would be revealed. They knew that the teacher knew the answer, many of the students probably already knew the answer, they certainly could have Googled it, and if they cared they probably would have.

Sometimes we do need to be the person asking the questions, sometimes we need to be the person transferring information; however, the quality of our questions, their power to engage and challenge thinking, combined with the opportunities we provide our students to ask the questions that matter to them are likely to be the times when the most powerful learning occurs.

By Nigel Coutts

The questions that matter most

As teachers we face numerous challenges as we manage our duties and strive to provide our students with the best opportunities to learn and realise their potential within a safe and supportive environment. We develop philosophies of learning, vision and mission statements; we plan programmes of learning, engage with professional development, communicate with parents and community members and through reflection and assessment refine our processes. We strive to meet the needs of individual learners in every aspect of their development and provide them with the pastoral care they require. All of this means our days are busy but also hopefully rewarding, the danger though is that sometimes in these busy days the little details that can make the biggest impact are lost or taken for granted.

Take questioning as an example of a piece of our teaching that we do every day but that can require a subtlety of detail that can be skipped within a busy lesson. Begin by considering who is asking the questions? Is it predominantly the teacher asking students questions to test their knowledge or recall? Is it students asking questions to clarify information? Is it a mix of student and teacher asking questions to generate inquiry topics or to dig deeper into a topic? Once we are clear on who is asking the questions and what their purpose is we can begin to examine the specific details of the questions.

We all try to ask questions that are open ended. Questions that can be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ clearly will not move the conversation forward, nor will questions with a straightforward response requiring little other than recall of a piece of information, but we know to avoid these. Thinking about the subtle details of how we pose questions leads to an examination of the language we use within our better questions. Do we model questions in ways that encourage divergent thinking where the students are able to think beyond imagined limitations and restrictions? Ponder the impact of asking ‘How can’ questions versus ‘How might’. This level of subtlety is one of the questioning factors explored by Warren Berger in ‘A More Beautiful Question’. ‘How might’ is one strategy he suggests is useful in encouraging students to think beyond constraints and moves them past counter questions of ‘can we’ or ‘should we’. For anyone with an interest in asking beautiful questions that drive knowledge and innovation, Warren’s book is a must read.

What manner of questions should we encourage our students to ask? If we are to encourage out of the box thinking and innovative ideas we must provide opportunities for students to ask questions that connect their interests and passions. If our students are always asking the questions we have imagined for them, or worse still that the textbook writer imagined, when do they get to imagine their own questions? Dr. Richard Curwin explores this in a blog post titled ‘Questions Before Answers: What drives a great lesson?’ Curwin explains the need for lessons centred on a question so engaging to students that it gets under their skin and compels them to inquire. I will argue that the most compelling questions are the great questions our students bring with them. 

Consider a typical lesson as a dialogue and then look at this dialogue from the perspective of the teacher and the student. Often it goes something like this: The teacher begins the class either stating or implying that “At the end of this hour you will know . . . or ‘at the end of this hour you will have discovered x, y & z’. The student hears this and thinks politely to themselves ‘why don’t you just tell me now’ or ‘if I can learn this in an hour how important can it be’ or ponders that favourite of all questions for students to ask ‘why do I have to learn this’. 

At the end of the lesson the student does indeed know the new fact or idea, they can parrot back an answer so they must. The teacher is happy and the lesson is deemed a success. At the end of the day the student goes home and answers the question 'what did you do in school today?', they answer ‘not much’ for them the lesson was a failure. Why?  For the student there was no learning, they acquired a new fact but that fact had no value because it was never linked to a question that mattered to them. It was not their question, it did not engage their interest and they just had to play the game to get to the end of the lesson where the fact would be revealed. They knew that the teacher knew the answer, many of the students probably already knew the answer, they certainly could have Googled it, and if they cared they probably would have.

Sometimes we do need to be the person asking the questions, sometimes we need to be the person transferring information; however, the quality of our questions, their power to engage and challenge thinking, combined with the opportunities we provide our students to ask the questions that matter to them are likely to be the times when the most powerful learning occurs. The challenge is to maximise these times. 

By Nigel Coutts