Questions, Questions and More Questions!

This week we had to focus on questions. I don't have to many artifacts about the questions I asked during class time but I will say that I spent more time preparing them then I normally do. I did noticed that I tend to ask a question that has part of the answer in it, instead of just asking an open ended question. So this week I tried open ended questions and calling on a few kids to answer the same question (even though all their answers were correct). I noticed A LOT more kids raised their hands when I allowed multiple people to answer without a correct or incorrect response from me. I took a class that gave me this idea, and the author of that book (Making Thinking Visible) explained that it allowed kids more confidence when you don't say whether they are right or wrong immediately after their response and allows more kids to raise their hands and say, "Well, what I think is..."

I tried it out last year and was amazed with the results and this year has been just as spectacular!

Another way I did this was to ask them one generic question and give them 10 minutes to come up with as many responses as they could. My question was, what would you like to share with the world about our classroom (this assignment was for our Student Blogging Challenge). They gave us amazing answers, some of the things I didn't realize would be so important they defended! After that list they had to come up with descriptive sentences to go with two of the important things they wanted to share with the world. If they said, "centers are fun." They had to describe to the person visiting the blog what was so fun about it. I now know I will be doing an "About the Classroom" page every year with my kids because this was a super cool experience for me to hear what they like about the classroom!

Another form of assessment, in my opinion, is to get kids to ask the questions based on knowledge or information. You truly see what they understood about their reading, or video, or project based on their questions at the end of it! I had kids write a list of questions for our Student Blogging Challenge and post it on their blog. Some of them were the basic, what's your name and grade, but some wanted to know about if they liked our blog, what is the weather like in your state, do you like your school. They truly understood what it meant to start a conversation with kids around the world. You can check that out at our blog.