As we continue to think and learn about inquiry based learning, what it really is, and easy to employ techniques to support it, I found the article titled, Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions. One small change can yield big results, by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, quite compelling.  Here’s what they have to say:

QFT – Question Formulation Technique is a process that develops students’ divergent (brainstorming), convergent (categorizing and prioritizing), and metacognitive (reflective) thinking abilities in a very short period of time.

The QFT process has six key steps:

Step 1: Teachers Design a Question Focus. The Question Focus, or QFocus, is a prompt that can be presented in the form of a statement or a visual or aural aid to focus and attract student attention and quickly stimulate the formation of questions. The QFocus is different from many traditional prompts because it is not a teacher’s question. It serves, instead, as the focus for student questions so students can, on their own, identify and explore a wide range of themes and ideas. For example, after studying the causes of the 1804 Haitian revolution, one teacher presented this QFocus: “Once we were slaves. Now we are free.” The students began asking questions about what changed and what stayed the same after the revolution.

Step 2: Students Produce Questions. Students use a set of rules that provide a clear protocol for producing questions without assistance from the teacher. The four rules are: ask as many questions as you can; do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; write down every question exactly as it was stated; and change any statements into questions. Before students start generating their questions, the teacher introduces the rules and asks the students to think about and discuss possible challenges in following them. Once the students get to work, the rules provide a firm structure for an open-ended thinking process. Students are able to generate questions and think more broadly than they would have if they had not been guided by the rules.

Step 3: Students Improve Their Questions. Students then improve their questions by analyzing the differences between open- and closed-ended questions and by practicing changing one type to the other. The teacher begins this step by introducing definitions of closed- and open-ended questions. The students use the definitions to categorize the list of questions they have just produced into one of the two categories. Then, the teacher leads them through a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of both kinds of questions. To conclude this step, the teacher asks the students to change at least one open-ended question into a closed-ended one, and vice versa, which leads students to think about how the phrasing of a question can affect the depth, quality, and value of the information they will obtain.

Step 4: Students Prioritize Their Questions. The teacher, with the lesson plan in mind, offers criteria or guidelines for the selection of priority questions. In an introduction to a unit, the instruction may be, “Choose the three questions you most want to explore further.” When designing a science experiment, it may be, “Choose three testable questions.” An essay related to a work of fiction may require that students select “three questions related to the key themes we’ve identified in this piece.” During this phase, students move from thinking divergently to thinking convergently, zero in on the locus of their inquiry, and plan concrete action steps for getting information they need to complete the lesson or task.

Step 5: Students and Teachers Decide on Next Steps. At this stage, students and teachers work together to decide how to use the questions. One teacher, for example, presented all the groups’ priority questions to the entire class the next day during a “Do Now” exercise and asked them to rank their top three questions. Eventually, the class and the teacher agreed on this question for their Socratic Seminar discussion: “How do poverty and injustice lead to violence in A Tale of Two Cities?”

Step 6: Students Reflect on What They Have Learned. The teacher reviews the steps and provides students with an opportunity to review what they have learned by producing, improving, and prioritizing their questions. Making the QFT completely transparent helps students see what they have done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then apply it in many other settings

The following is a synopsis of an article found in The Atlantic (July/August 2011) titled, The World’s SchoolMaster.  As we visit districts in Canada and the US, many of us are hearing talk around the PISA.  This synopsis may help in your understanding of this test and its implications.  Note, the following observations are pulled directly from the text of the article.

In 1996, Schleicher (the world’s schoolmaster – Duncan loves this guy and consults with him regularly) joined the OECD  (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and designed the PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment) to move the organization from measuring inputs, like spending on schools, to outputs, how much kids learn.  The test measures beyond students’ retention of facts.  It measures their readiness for knowledge worker jobs and their ability to think critically and solve real world problems.  To remain economically competitive we need to measure what students actually know and from there, make decisions.

Spring of 2000, all 30 OECD members and two other countries had a sampling of their 15 year old’s take the PISA.  The results caused uproar.  The US ranked somewhere above Greece and below Canada, a middling performance we’ve repeated every round since.  The Germans ranked even lower than us.

US response: it’s our immigrants.  Not so, our native-born perform just as unimpressively as our immigrants.  Apparently a country’s wealth does not predict success.  Poverty is destiny in America where as in Canada and Finland, their poor perform much better than our poor.  One big beef was that the first PISA exam only took a sampling of approximately 5000 US students, not enough of a representative sampling to really matter.  Samplings are much bigger now, but I don’t have the exact numbers of US students tested most recently.

So what do high performing districts do, according to Schleicher’s research?

1.    Teacher training schools are much more rigorous and selective
2.    They put developing high quality principals and teachers above efforts like reducing class size or equipping sports teams
3.    And once they have these well-trained professionals in place, they found ways to hold the teachers accountable for results while allowing creativity in their methods
4.    Notably, they devoted equal or more resources to the schools with the poorest kids

Today, 70 countries collectively give PISA to representative samples of more than 500,000 15 year olds every three years.  A longitudinal study of 30,000 Canadian students recently found PISA scores to be more accurate than report card grades in predicting which kids will go to college.  In 2010, Shanghai, participated in the PISA.  They trounced every single country.  Schleicher believes this is due to a policy of rotating the best teachers into the region’s worst performing schools, the opposite of what tends to happen in the US.

Oregon, Japan and Germany now include PISA questions on their own standardized tests.  Steven Paine, former superintendent of West Virginia, redesigned his state’s curriculum to make it more demanding, based in part on PISA findings stating, “We had set the bar too low.”

In the end culture is created by what we do.  Schleicher has since developed a pilot test for schools in the US to compare their individual school scores to those in the world.  Thanks for reading.  C