THE QUESTIONING WINDOW: How to use questioning to build Student-Centered Instruction

Pace is sharing his findings on "The most polluted places on Earth" based on his own question during class. His inquiry led other classmates into researching polluted rivers, cities and pollution-related issues such as the tree-chopping crime in the Amazon rainforest!

Sometimes we feel trapped in the middle of a monologue when we teach. Avoiding these "lectures" as we teach will put the ball in the right side, giving students the responsibility for developing learning experiences and insights as we move along the curriculum. Such a demanding task is well-supported by our school's flexible use of time and the Program of Inquiry that drives day-to-day instruction. In her book, Betty Hollas reminds us all of the need of having the students as the center of the instruction, "it means the focus is off you an on your students, it means students are doing something,as opposed to just sitting and listening" pg.27. Teaching will become a more effective task if we deveote more time to really think our questions and if we provide enough time for students to develop questioning skills and come up with their own questions. All of these elements will provide a high-quality instruction in which you are aiming at higher-level thinking, students will be more engaged and encouraged to see new perspectives and construct meaning, aspects which related and fit perfectly into the PYP curricular framework. She then moves on and keeps us thinking by asking "Which is more important in your classroom, the question or the answer?". What do you think? How much more can your students learn if you let them drive the questioning? Are students doing self-differentiation when they ask their questions? How far can we go as teachers if we use the well-known Bloom's taxonomy to consciously reach higher levels of thinking in our questions?

Some of the strategies I've been using in my classroom include the following:

• Differentiated Wait time: giving enough time for students to think about what they're going to say. I usually prompt my students after a question to say it in their minds, double check to see if it sounds good, then say it again and then raise their hands. Mrs. Hollas recommends that we have teh students show understanding of what we're teaching every 8 to 10 minutes by pairing up students and share, playing a quick game, etc.
• Question Tic-Tac-Toe / Cubes (using Bloom's taxonomy): a great way to validate elarning styles and readiness in your classroom!
• Question posters: Display a piece of poster paper with a question related to your current unit, then encourage students to add their answers on sticky notes as the lesson moves on. By doing this, my students have been able to propose their own poster questions to be answered by all the class.
• Questions Wall (Adapted from Betty Holla's Questions that Keep going around my head): I created a wall including a photo of each student in a thinking pose, then I added speech bubbles and laminated them. Every time a student asks a relevant question related to our unit of inquiry, or if he/she makes an interesting statement, I record those on the bubble for further study or research. Valuing these questions has promoted a culture of questioning in my classroom that the children enjoy and feel very proud of. We also include an Inquirer of the Week in our weekly homework summary sheet, highlighting the questioning and inquiiry skills of one of our kids and sharing that with the parents of our class. See the attachment for details.
• Give me five! using a graphic organizer depicting a hand, students answer the following questions when we read a book: What mental pictures do I see? (visualization), What does this remind me of? (Connections), What do I know now, even though I wasn't told the information in the text? (inference), What might happen next? (Prediction), What was this mostly about? (Summarization/conclusions)
• But the Answer's not here!: An adaptation to this strategy has led me to work hard with my students on types of questions: right-there questions, questions that need research and thinking, and questions that require that I connect with the text.
• D.E.A.Q (Drop Everything And Question): every other week, we would stop our routine and use question starters to tell the kids to think of questions using these. I collect the questions and use them for further work on ur inquiry or for reading comprehension/homework purposes.

As we are immersed in an inquiry-based program, we should become aware of the need to always be ready in terms of questioning. Betty Hollas suggests a common-sense practice that we might disregard as we plan our instruction: Planning questions as a key aspect of our teaching. By following our goals and indicators, targeting these and translating them into activities that make meaning of the content and constantly monitoring our students' success through ongoing assessment, the questioning comes in handy in order to articulate everything altogether.

I love the image that Mrs. Hollas shares about us teachers being a pitcher in a baseball game, "the pitcher determines what pitches to throw, and he determines the speed and location of the ball. The greater the variety of pitches a pitcher can throw, the more he can influence the success of his team" Pag. 4

Useful Resources I've found:

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uKqs3D0Z0M
http://pzweb.harvard.edu/vt/VisibleThinking_html_files/01_VisibleThinkingInAction/01a_VTInAction.html