Questions for Clarity of Purpose and to Assess

 

Chapter 2 of Karin Hess’ Rigor by Design, Not Chance discusses the critical importance of asking probing questions to support deeper learning. These questions matter in part because “cognitive science research reminds us that long-term storage of information in the brain depends on the learner making connections and seeing the usefulness of constructing their own meaning (Hess, pg. 32). Hess goes on to share that questioning must be done with purpose and intention and to invite honest and individual engagement with the materials. I found her figure on pg. 39 very interesting as it helped to demonstrate the ways that questions can align with Depth of Knowledge. Questions should be used across the assessment cycle, both to drive learning and to help assess student learning. I appreciated the different strategies she offered, but I think the most important idea was that questions can be used to both guide student learning and help teachers respond to student needs by identifying what information they may still need to engage with the materials in a way that is deeply rigorous.

 

Hess’ work is very nearly connected to an ongoing project I am engaged with that involves building capacity for social studies teachers to teach students through an inquiry process that would reflect the rigorous demands Hess outlines in her books. We have been engaged with the Inquiry  Design Model framework, which includes what is defined as  “compelling question” and what can be considered “supporting questions.” In their article “Questions that Compel and Support,” the authors suggest that teachers often struggle with differentiating the two questions. While they grasp the power of questioning in the classroom. The authors write that “the simple distinction is that a compelling question frames an inquiry, and a supporting question helps make the compelling question actionable” (Grant, et al., 2017, p. 200).  By making this distinction, the authors are suggesting that teachers need to not only understand the content and its demands, but also consider what would compel curiosity and a response from their students.

As I read their article, I was immediately taken back to professional development I had around building essential questions. To be honest I have been guilty of two of the mistakes I see most often – either questions that remain so lofty in their framing that young adult learners find no connections to them, or so basic in their construction that students find no challenge in addressing them. Learning question stems and rules for open-ended questions are not enough. Good questioning is an art and a science. What Hess’ work, and the related article, have made clear is that effective classroom questioning might need a little of both by offering purposeful question sequencing.

In sharing her viewing of Teaching Channel video, Hess makes the point that questions should be designed to build upon one another. Similarly, the inquiry framework outlined in the article I found demonstrates that a good compelling question must be crafted to support the inquiry process the compelling question is challenging students to engage with. This is like a question that Hess would call “dialogic,” or open-ended, philosophical, and challenging. As an example, the authors discuss a social students inquiry model that asks students “Is compromise always fair?” We know that students are often grappling with the nature of “fairness,” so this seems like a good question, but it is far too broad of a question to guide student inquiry by itself. Therefore, the authors demonstrate how the teacher purposefully designed a questioning sequence that allowed them to consider this question within the lens of the development of the U.S. Constitution, especially in the use of the “Great Compromise” which resulted in a bicameral legislature that had one house in which states are represented equally (the Senate) and another in which representation is determined by population (the House). Suddenly, the compelling question has a real purpose to guide the inquiry, but the supporting questions ensure that students get the background knowledge (the content) to be able to make a claim. Supporting questions in the shared inquiry included:

·         How was representation determined under the Articles of Confederation?

·         What was the Virginia Plan?

·         What was the New Jersey Plan?

·         How did Connecticut break the impasse?

Each of these questions invited performance tasks that would be formative and that included a variety of texts or sources to build student knowledge.

Returning to Hess’ work, it becomes clear that the inquiry design model values questions of varying complexity and levels because DOK questions at the lower levels (such as remember and understand) can help teachers assess whether students are ready for those that require them to analyze or evaluate. Therefore, both questions require clarity of purpose: has the planning considered where the inquiry is to lead and what knowledge and skill does a student need to get there? It is only after those questions have been considered that a teacher should then explore and use the strategies Hess shares in Chapter 2. Without a clarity of purpose and intention for the learning, the questions become the end themselves, not the thinking that they are asking from the student.

References

Grant, S.G., Swan, K. & Lee, J. (2017). Questions that compel and support. Social Education 81(4), 200-203. https://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/publications/articles/se_8104200.pdf

 

Hess, K. (2023). Rigor by design not chance: Deeper Thinking through actionable instruction and assessment. ASCD.