Tag: inquiry

25 Jan 21 – Don’t Teach How

A teacher friend opened up her current events assignment from its previous scope after some family pushback. Current events being what they are, some families sniffed an agenda where there was none. Still, it worried the friend.

gray wooden maze
Photo by Soulful Pizza on Pexels.com

She wants her students following contemporary informational texts across a span of time. She wants them tracking how stories are told about a specific event or idea. She is not so much interested in shaping her students’ political leanings.

This was not what the families thought was happening.

She went the route of being less helpful.

Together, her students brainstormed a list of every possible current event they could think of. Everything on the table.

And, just before the brainstorm, a letter home to parents and caregivers.

“Hey,” it said, “your kid is about to start asking questions about the world. It can be about anything happening in said world. Would you help a teacher out and help them pick something that lines up with what you care about as a family?”

I’m paraphrasing.

Then, the students started submitting the topics they thought they might like to dig a bit more deeply on. The swath, my friend has told me, is much wider than could have been imagined.

This does not surprise me. Given the opportunity to ask questions about the world and a little assistance in thinking about which parts of the world, our students will always astound us.

The next thing for these students to do is use the Question Formulation Technique developed by the folx at rightquestion.org to come up with mound and heaps and oodles of questions about their topics. Then, they get to set about the task about finding the answers and, if they’re doing it right, more questions.

The relieved teacher friend and I were talking.

“Of course this is better,” I said, “You’ve proven you don’t care what they think, but that they think and think deeply about their world.”

It doesn’t matter the topic. That skill is transferrable.

20 Jan 21 – One Good Question

For those keeping track, I went on another lunch run today. That’s three in the last four work days. Running has always been where I get my thinking done. I ruminate.

Today, I was thinking about classrooms – physical, digital, and those who have yet to make up their minds – and how I know they must be struggling to create the communities that must be established as foundations of learning.

I started thinking about what I would do. I came up with questioning. This is not surprising for a guy who really hangs his hat on inquiry. For this, though, I was trying to think of something a teacher could implement with absolutely no prep and yet reap a deep benefit in shoring up community.

The idea is to challenge students to come up with one good question they would be interested in hearing their peers answer and would be okay with answering themselves. Then, they pair or group up and share their questions and answers.

Sure, sure, there can be reporting out, sharing, and asking who had similar questions or answers. But, there doesn’t need to be. All that’s necessary for community to begin to form is for people to try to find out about one another and to share a piece of themselves.

Not having a classroom of my own, I used our dinnertime conversation as a testing ground this evening. “Think of one good question you want all of us to answer, and we’ll take turns answering.”

They wanted a model, so I went first. “What’s one thing that can almost always make you smile when you are sad?” Tickling was a popular response.

My daughter was next, “What do you like about doing our gratefuls?” Our “gratefuls” are our nightly ritual of putting a coin in a mason jar and sharing at least one thing we are grateful for that day. Hearing what both kids thought about the process was wonderful.

The boy went last, “Are you afraid of heights?”

I had to think about my answer. I wasn’t sure. Turns out, yup, sometimes.

So, with one text audience of kids who will definitely let me know if one of my ideas is bad or stupid, I had a 100% success rate. You will too.

Try it tomorrow. Even if those you’re learning with are adults. All it takes is One Good Question to bring us closer.

If Students Aren’t Wondering, You’re Doing it Wrong (33/365)

Photo by Rick Hatch on Unsplash

I spent a day working with a few hundred teachers a while back, helping them think on the topic of “effective questions”. The conversations were wide and varied. We covered the theoretical and the practical. My goal and charge was to make sure this conversation about student inquiry led to everyone in the room having something to back with them Monday to shift their practice in ways that opened the door to more student inquiry.

A some point in the second conversation, I realized I have one overarching, non-negotiable component to effective questions in classrooms and schools – they come from students.

A some point in the second conversation, I realized I have one overarching, non-negotiable component to effective questions in classrooms and schools – they come from students.


You don’t ask effective questions, you open the door for them, create the environments for them to spring forward, and honor them as they surface.

When I get to visit schools, no matter the stated purpose of a classroom visit or observation, I leave with one metric I value above all others – “Do I know what the students in that class were curious about?”

This is different than the question of what can students in that classroom do or what do they know. These are the questions of City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel’s instructional rounds, and they are important.

They also wedge open the door of compliance over exploration. I can leave knowing a student can perform a complex scientific experiment or recite a renowned soliloquy and be rightly impressed.

If I leave these rooms without a clear understanding of what these capable students are wondering, we’ve missed the mark. These are students who are competent, but they are not necessary students who are curious.

Watching a room brimming with evidence of student curiosity is an altogether different thing. Such classrooms are spaces where – were the teacher not to show up the next day – it is entirely possible the students would keep on with their exploration and tinkering.

This is also the reason I’ve latched on so tightly to Rothstein and Santana’s Question Formulation Technique and the brilliance of their book and suggestion of “Make just one change.” For those uninitiated to the QFT, the steps are as follows:

  1. Design a question focus.
  2. Produce questions.
  3. Work with closed-ended and open-ended questions.
  4. Prioritize questions.
  5. Plan next steps.
  6. Reflect.

After that, Rothstein and Santana suggest, a teacher can continue on with their lessons as they would have were the QFT not a practice they’d adopted. Sure, they could, but I find it difficult to comprehend why they would. If you’ve ever seen a classroom of students who are conditioned to a compliant, prescribed model of learning taste curiosity for the first time in their school careers, you know that toothpaste is unlikely to go back in the tube. You know it because of the spark in students, and you know it because of the energy it brings to teaching.

Two weeks ago, I had the honor of guest teaching in some grade 11 English classrooms. No ground was broken. I spent most of the time asking students about conversations and what made good ones and what led to bad ones. Then, I let them practice and helped through some processing. What did they want to figure out about having good conversations, I asked them. The opinions were as diverse as the room.

“You got X to talk,” the class’s teacher said, “That’s the most I’ve ever heard him say in a class all year.” When I thought about his contributions later, I realized the moments of X’s participation that struck me as most powerful were not what he knew, but what he wondered.

Here was a student who had been waiting for the invitation for inquiry for too long. I wonder how many others are waiting for similar invitations. I wonder what it will take to prop open the door.

No Question is Simple (28/365)

spider web covered in dew
Photo by Nicolas Picard on Unsplash

“In a bulleted list, what are the rules about punctuation at the end of each line?” I asked a room of English teachers yesterday. Answering off the top of their heads, they began responding with competing rules, several beginning with, “Isn’t it…”

Some started searching online for an answer. In a few seconds, we had a new collection of “According tos” thrown into the mix. What’s more, when asking the question, I’d had an answer in my head and was throwing out the query to get support for my thinking. None came. Each proffered answer was different from what had been in my head when I asked.

Recognizing we were now awash in myriad answers, people started asking me to refine my question and help them understand the specific problem I was trying to solve. Their initial answers, they realized, were specific to the context they’d envisioned when I’d asked, not to the context that had sparked my need for understanding. They’d given their answers, not mine. Even though their first replies were too me, it took time to make their thinking actually about me.

If you’d asked me ahead of time what I was expecting, I’d have said I’d ask the question, others would answer with facts fitting the question, and I’d move on. I was, to my thinking, asking a simple question of experts in the content area about which I was curious.

No question is simple. Most of our initial answers are more about us than the question. Discerning the relevant and pertinent facts takes time and expertise. Everyone will have an opinion. The asking of the question is only the beginning of our work.

In the end, I went with semicolons.

What if we learned about our students differently?

When I started teaching at SLA, there was a standing assignment for 9th grade students. It had begun with the inaugural class and had continued into the second year when I picked up my teaching load. Me Magazineswere a way for students in their English classes to get to know and share about one another as they started a new year in a new school. As SLA draws from myriad middle schools around Philadelphia, it made sense for this new cohort to have a chance to share and get to know one another.

I don’t share this with any illusions that Me Magazines were avant garde or broke any molds of creativity. I’ve been around enough to know the Me Magazine was of a family of activities teachers ask of their students at the start of the school year. There’s the Where I’m From poem, the I Am poem and any number of derivations. Instead, I’m sharing about Me Magazines because I wish I hadn’t assigned them.

They started my year off on the wrong foot. It was in that gray area that looks like augmented student agency. It tiptoes around authenticity. “The students are writing about themselves, their lives, and their experiences,” you might say, “How is that not agency and authenticity?”

Well, for one, their doing it in a way that says, “This is how you share about yourself in this space. I want you to talk about yourself and consider where you’re from, but I want you to do it in the way I tell you to.” While the content may be specific to the student, such assignments are often a more creative version of telling students they need to make a PowerPoint presentation and it needs to have N slides with X on Slide Y, etc.

To redesign the assignment, my question is always to return to the purpose of the task and experience. What, at its core, are we attempting to do when we assign these get-to-know-you openers to the school year?

  1. We, as teachers, want to know who these fresh faces are and how they talk about themselves.
  2. We want to students to have a forum to share pieces of their histories with their peers.
  3. We want to see what they can do as a baseline in writing when give familiar content.
  4. We want to create a sense that this space is one where it is safe to share.
  5. We want to position the class as one where agency, voice, and authenticity matter.

So, let’s take a turn at opening up the assignment so that we are adding structure to the experience, but not necessarily the final product.

  1. Instead of building in your questions for content, open up the assignment for students to share the aspects of classmates they think it’s important to know and share. Compile a brainstormed list as a class and then give students (maybe in groups) a chance to elect one question to priority status, so it’s built into the assignment. This is also an opportunity to work on building consensus.
  2. Open the format of the presentation of learning to student choice. “What’s the best way for you to share who you are with this class?” This not only opens up student agency and choice, but it will help you see whom among your students decides to perform and who decides to build or code.
  3. Explain your purpose as a teacher. The learning shouldn’t be a secret. Yes, you’ll open it up to students’ chosen presentation formats, and you’re looking for some specific understandings as well. If this is an assignment that is meant to help you understand students as writers, then tell perhaps whatever they design must include a written component. Or, if you want to keep the thrust of things open, say the one thing you’re going to require is a reflective piece of writing explaining why they made the choices they did and how they think those choices affected the outcome.
  4. Have options at the ready. As was the case in my classroom, you’re going to have students who are overwhelmed by choice. Have pathways at the ready to help these students work through selecting the right format for them. This is where you might drop in Diana’s speed learning activity. You might pair students who are stuck with parents who immediately stand out as wealths of ideas. And, in the rare moments all this doesn’t help, you’ve got those formats mentioned above at the ready to be modified to fit whatever the class has decided is important.

Making these tweaks to the traditional assignment moves us closer to our goals for the experience while also adding in elements of collaboration, student inquiry, and making the classroom a more transparent place.

Cross-posted on Medium.

Why We Don’t Ask if We’re a Learning Organization

You may be a learner, you may use a learning device. Does that matter if you’re not part of a learning organization?

My guess is no.

Today, I participated in Ben Wilkoff’s session at Future Ready: A Technovation Institute. The conversation was geared around some deeper thinking of what we mean and imply when we invoke the “1:1” ration in talking about learners and devices.

Midway through, Ben asked us to think about what is needed to support learners in tech-rich environments and what is needed to support devices as tools for deeper learning in those environments.

My answer kept coming back to the place where my thinking’s been living these last few weeks – learning organizations. Being a part of such an organization is necessary for both learners and devices to move beyond the shiny of new tech in learning.

Here’s what I mean by that.

Sure, classrooms, schools, and districts purport to be learning organizations in that they are organizations designed to facilitate the learning of those in their charge or care – namely, students. And, yes, this is a good goal. It is certainly better than being teaching organizations or education organizations. To hit lightly on being a learning organization is to at least imply that your goal is the learning of those within your system.

What I’d posit is necessary for the ongoing support of learners and the view of technology as tools for learning is that the classroom, school, or district is, itself, a learning organization. Better phrased, is any of these an organization that learns? Dice that apart. A school that is comprised of teachers who are learners may find itself ahead of other schools where teachers don’t engage their curiosity or agency to satisfy that agency.

Such a school still cannot go as far if it does not attempt, as an institution to learn from its mistakes, to move forward as a whole, and to be better as a learning body. This is part of what Chris and I mean when we write “Be One School.”

To be a learning organization classrooms, schools, and districts – either by dictate or consensus – would identify a driving, commonly held curiosity and then move toward investigating that curiosity together.

Whenever I’ve had the chance to talk to the leadership of any organization of which I’ve been a part, I’ve asked one question, “What are the three things you hope we’re working toward this year?” For whatever reason, I’ve yet to pose that question to a leader and get a coherent answer. Maybe they don’t know, maybe they’re being politic, or maybe they’re resistant to make their own goals the goals of all.

Imagine, though, what could happen if a superintendent, principal, or teacher engaged in a process of identifying those wicked problems to be investigated throughout the year. Shared ownership of these problems and shared learning toward their solutions would be a powerfully unifying experience.

From Theory to Practice:

  • If your organization has a leadership team or committee, pull them together and ask what big issues they would like to grapple with in the coming year. Make updates on learning a standing item on each meeting agenda.
  • In the classroom, select the big buckets of learning (usually disciplines) and have students work through their big questions for each bucket. Keep track of answers and new questions as the year progresses.
  • If you’re at the very beginning of this work and need to build cohesion, build a simple question into your formal conversations, “What is something you’re trying to figure out right now?” Keep track of the answers you get and see how you might be able to use common threads to plan events, learning sessions, and communications toward common cause.

I’m Falling Behind My Questions

Racin' Snails 2

I long ago gave up on examining all the information available to me. I’m slowly coming to accept I haven’t the time or focus to examine all the information that interests me either. The piles of books littering my home and office along with the dozens of articles I’ve currently got open across multiple devices are evidence I might be more curious than I have time for.

When I started talking with and coaching educators on building a conceptual framework for managing information flow as they started to utilize digital tools, my advice was to focus on those topics about which they were most interested. Now, that reasoning only stands to serve intensely acurious individuals.

Every question I can pose has a corresponding rabbit whole waiting for me to jump. Each of those books and open articles is a map of where I intend to jump – later. I don’t know that later will ever come. Not for all of them.

I will never have time to read and consider the answers to all of my questions. They are too many and the sources of information more multitudinous still.

Faced with the question of how to deal with an overflow of information now, my answer is to focus on the answers you need in the moment, and decide if free time is worth dedicating to new information or reflecting on the learning you’ve already done.

Given the effect of a full cognitive load, the answer might be none of the above. Folks might opt to zone out and let information settle. As much as I love learning and swoon over inquiry, the infinite information stream also calls for quietly doing nothing of consequence so that I can better appreciate the consequences of those answers I decide are worth chasing.

I know all of this, and yet I still pick up more books for which I can’t conceive finding the time or open yet another collection of interesting browser tabs. Because, maybe, I’ll get around to it as soon as I’ve read everything else.

I’m Exhaling Answers

Nancy Dwyer

I’m not one for answers. Giving them, anyway. I dig the search for answers, and I’m happy to help you on your way to whatever answers you’ve deemed worthy of your time. I’m not the person to whom you should turn if you’re expecting answers to questions that aren’t in my unique locus of control.

But I sure do inhale the loose ends, the un-networked nodes, the ideas in the ether that aren’t tremendously useful to me in the moment, but represent the potential of usefulness down the road.

I breath these ideas in and let them fire the respiratory flow of possibilities.

Then, in front of a classroom – in a conference presentation, on an email chain, or a chance meeting – I exhale these loose ends in hopes of creating a more complete atmosphere of answers to your questions. It turns out I’ve been carrying these loose ends to help you tie and tidy up your questions.

I’m the fellow who’s spent hours reading research reports, opening tab after tab on his browser window, shaking every hand at the party and cataloging them all in my head for that one question you ask when I’m on a panel. Often, far too often, the other folks will dodge your question. They’ll give you philosophical answers that start with, “That’s a good question,” with the subtext of, “And I’m going to answer a completely different one right now.”

That’s when I’m ready to exhale and say, “I don’t know if this will be helpful, but here are four specific places you should look to help you down your path.” I can’t promise they’ll get you everywhere you want to be, but they will get you closer than you are now.” It’s also my way of acknowledging I don’t know the answer, but I can hopefully connect you with someone who does.

In the classroom or working with a group of educators in professional development, my exhale may seem foul. Not because of me, but because of what’s come before. People are often conditioned for the yes or the no. They’re expecting the, “That’s wrong, and here’s what’s right.”

That’s not how I breath. My telling you doesn’t teach you. It might give you something new to tell others, but I’m dubious of someone who answers any question with, “Because Zac told me.” You’re ideas need something stronger than hearsay as their foundation.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning

Question, don’t Copy

jigsaw_puzzle_hires_designerspics_CC0

When doing the work to transform learning in a system, simply copying what other people are doing won’t get you what you need in the long run – not with the consistency another approach might provide.

That other approach? Find out what questions the other folks asked, and then ask those same questions within the system in which you find yourself.

Lifting the work of others, specifically highly-effective work deeply seated within a specific community (and these are the projects that most are most often ripe for replication) guarantees unsustainable or less-effective results.

An example?

Let’s say a principle and leadership team from a rural high school makes a trip to visit several highly-touted urban high schools within a few hours drive. While touring, they note that one of the schools has an internship program for its students that allows them to partner with local companies, non-profits, and service organizations for academic credit.
Talking with the leadership and participating students in the urban school, the rural school team hears strong testimony about the success of the program in helping students to discover and develop nascent interests and build networks of social capital they wouldn’t otherwise have had access to without the internship program.

“Yes,” the members of the rural team agree on their drive home, “This is a program we need to start when we get home.” And they do. The next school year, they start the program, placing 11th- and 12th-grade students with similar partners in larger neighboring communities.

Midway through the school year, despite the best intentions and hard work by a dedicated faculty and staff, the program is failing spectacularly.

Students often beg off the drive to partner organizations, citing travel times as unfair burdens and complaining about the added schedule demands on homework and extra curricular participation. Those without access to transportation find themselves relegated to a less diverse selection of partner organizations and are understandably jealous of their better-resourced partners.

By the end of the year, the rural leadership team decides the program more arduous than worthwhile given its diminishing returns. “The urban school,” they agree, “is better resourced to offer such dynamic experiences to it’s students.”

If only they’d asked questions instead of building someone else’s solution.

What questions? How about:

  •  What is the problem we are trying to solve?
  • What resources – physical and virtual – are at our disposal to help us solve that problem?
  • What is it about the urban program that we would like our students to experience in our own community?
  • What are the differences between our setting and the urban school and how do those differences present advantages and disadvantages?
  • What questions did the urban school ask as they developed their program?

Coming at the issue from a questioning rather than copying standpoint would likely have allowed our rural school to head off many, if not all, of the problems it experienced in implementation.

Perhaps the school would realize the lack of immediately local partners was an opportunity for students to identify local needs for community organizing and coordination. Perhaps the school would recognize that students could build these partnerships for the betterment of their town and leverage online access to experts and information to help build student capacity where deficits existed.

Questioning, not copying, would likely have resulted in a product that looks little like the urban program on the surface, but a product that provides the rural students with the same kinds of learning experiences that excited the rural team in the first place.

In the same way we don’t borrow from another puzzle when we realize we are missing a few pieces from the jigsaw we’re currently working, we cannot expect copying from other systems will provide the fit we need to serve the people in our care.

Passing the test of knowing how to talk to kids

Marcie Hull said something toward the beginning of our friendship that told me we would get along well.

When pointing to a couple at a restaurant during one of our first meals together, Marcie said, “He knows how to talk to kids.”

The he of the mixed-sex pair, was presumably the father of the 6 or 7 year old girl sitting between them.

I paused for a moment to eavesdrop on the conversation going on at the other table before asking Marcie what she meant.

I heard the man talking to the child in a voice that was warm, engaged, and likely very similar to the same voice he would use with the woman sitting with him or to a server that happened by.

I asked Marcie if what I was inferring had captured her meaning, and she said it had.

Since that conversation, this has become one of the litmus tests I use the first time I meet adults who work with children. Right or wrong, it is my brain deciphering how much those adults believe children are capable of.

The tone we reserve for babies and pets does not urge children to respond with aspiration.

It is a tone not of equals, but of esteem. Often, adults to who use this tone or register with children are also willing to have conversations with children to help them work through whatever they may misunderstand or question about a situation.

In his book How Children Learn, John Holt brings up this point again and again when describing encounters with children intent upon learning something. A child proffers a question and Holt proffers an answer in a tone he might also offer a colleague of similar age and experience.

His words (and the words I’ve seen Marcie use time and again when helping children work through difficult problems) are perhaps more intricate. They contain fewer assumptions of the shared language of mastery that can build up over time.

This is the tone we should use with our students, those who show up to learn alongside us each day.

They are, as Dewey implied, more immature in their learning, but not in their curiosity about the world.

The tone we reserve for babies and pets does not urge children to respond with aspiration.

I should make the distinction here between tone and content.

There are some who agree with what I’ve written so far with whom I deeply disagree. These are the people who talk to kids in the tone I’m describing, but bring that tone to bear encumbered by the expectations of adulthood. These adults forget the tempest of emotions they likely experienced during their youth and the vulnerability that comes with learning something new or complex like engineering or fitting in to new social situations. They forget they are the adults in the conversation and that the children with whom they are speaking are in their care.

These adults confusing speaking as an adult with speaking to an adult.

That’s unfair.

Working with a new class of ninth graders, Marcie speaks to them with a tone of esteem and respect, but her words also denote an underlying listening that is taking place between each thing she says. She is probing to find out how she can most effectively leverage her own experiences as a technologist, an artist, or a person against the learning taking place without becoming overwhelming.

Holt understood this too. He wrote about answering a child’s questions and accepting when the child wandered off, ready to mess about with something else. He wasn’t angered. He didn’t try to fill the space between them with more and more content as the figurative passing bell chimed. Not only was the tone he used respectful of the people he was interacting with, but he was respectful when they signaled they’d received the answers they needed. I think of this as the same way you or I would accept the signals from adult colleague when they noted they were ready to move on.

I know there are many ways to talk about this, from discussions of register to developmental tones. For me, what helps me keep my thinking centered, is Marcie’s plainly laid out knowing how to talk to kids.