{"id":943,"date":"2014-07-10T13:39:49","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T13:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/wp\/?p=943"},"modified":"2014-07-10T13:43:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T13:43:41","slug":"keeping-the-dice-rolling-questioning-in-pbl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/2014\/07\/10\/keeping-the-dice-rolling-questioning-in-pbl\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping the Dice Rolling: Questioning in PBL"},"content":{"rendered":"

Returning from a week-long conference is always invigorating for me \u2013 not for the reasons that many people think.\u00a0 I do appreciate the great feedback I get from my \u201cteacher-students\u201d that I interact with during the week who are so extremely eager to learn about PBL \u2013 this truly invigorates me and allows me to do so much work over the summer myself.\u00a0 However, what I always look forward to is how much I personally learn from the interactions with my students that week.\u00a0 At this point, PBL is so popular in its use in mathematics classrooms across the country, although people see me as an expert in the field, I gain so much from the questions and process of those who are learning that it is so useful for me to move through that process with them all the time.\u00a0 I believe this is why they call it \u201cprofessional development\u201d!\u00a0 So I just wanted to give a HUGE shout-out of thanks to everyone who took my workshops, came to my Cwic sessions, had conversations with me or interacted in some way \u2013 it might have been one of the best professional weeks I\u2019ve ever had!<\/p>\n

Since that week in New Hampshire, I\u2019ve done a lot of reading, editing of my own materials, and catching up with my own work.\u00a0 I recently read a blogpost on edutopia entitled \u201cThe Importance of Asking Questions to Promote Higher-Order Competencies\u201d<\/a> which stood out to me as something that we talked a great deal about in my own PBL classes, although this blogpost was not specifically about PBL or math at all.\u00a0 It was written by a professor at Rutgers University in the Psychology Department, Maurice Elias, who is part of the Rutgers Social-Emotional Learning Lab, and made me wonder if he had done any work with Cindy Hmelo-Silver, who is also at Rutgers and does work with PBL in Psychology.\u00a0 The concept of asking questions is something that we discuss and practice in my workshops because Hmelo-Silver says that it is a characteristic of an experienced PBL teacher to ask probing questions that are metacognitive and at a higher-order level.\u00a0 Interestingly, the four areas that Elias discuss are often not linked to higher-order thinking (for example, yes\/no questions) so I thought I might take his \u201cGoldilocks\u201d example and try it through the lens of math PBL. \u00a0Elias\u2019 four questioning techniques are 1)Suggest 2) Ask a Closed Question 3)Ask an open question and 4)The Two Question Rule.<\/p>\n

The idea of \u201csuggestion<\/strong>\u201d is one that I always tried to stay away from since student voice and experience is first and foremost in my mind as a pillar of the PBL pedagogy.\u00a0 Allowing students to make first attempts at making those connections on their own I believe takes precedence over critical thinking skills of choosing from alternatives.\u00a0 However, that concept of making a choice between alternatives is important as well and might be a very good skill to have them practice every now and then deliberately.\u00a0 I think I will begin to try this in class.\u00a0 The next time when it seems like no one has an idea or when the student at the board is going in the wrong direction, I may decide to say something like \u201cShould Joe go with the method of completing the square or factoring here?\u201d<\/p>\n

The second idea of asking the closed question<\/strong> (yes or no) is also one that I have always tried to stay away from.\u00a0 In my experience it\u2019s kind of a conversation staller, but the way it\u2019s explained by Elias in his blogpost is actually a very interesting twist on the closed question.\u00a0 It takes a yes or no question but embeds an opinion in it, so almost forces a justification of the closed question with the yes or no.\u00a0 It makes the teacher find a way for the student to continue (well, the teacher must make sure the student follows up).\u00a0 So for example, if the teacher asks asks, \u201cDo you think the quadrilateral is a rhombus?\u201d it might seem very obvious that a student could just say yes or no and the conversation could just end there.\u00a0 Everything I\u2019ve read about closed questions say that you should not phrase the question that way but be sure that the question has within it some interest in the student\u2019s opinion. \u201cWhy do you think it\u2019s a good idea to argue that this quadrilateral is a rhombus?\u201d (Which is a closed question in disguise but opens up the conversation).<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the Open-Ended Question<\/strong> (or what Bingham calls a True Question) which I have written about before<\/a>.\u00a0 I talk about this in my workshops as well and real open-ended questions are questions that the teacher doesn\u2019t really know the answer to.\u00a0 I love Bingham\u2019s analogy of trying to predict with your students what the sum of two dice will be (the answer)\u00a0 but trying to keep the dice rolling for as long as possible without knowing the answer.<\/p>\n

\"Dice<\/a><\/p>\n

What\u2019s an example of this type of question in mathematics?\u00a0 This is a tough one because as we know so well, there are definitely right and wrong answers in mathematics.\u00a0 However, we can ask questions like \u201cWhy did you chose that method?\u201d and \u201cWhat do you think of Sara\u2019s argument? Do you agree with her?\u201d These types of questions can make mathematics teachers very uncomfortable but we can keep the box wiggling for great deal longer than we could before with these questions and they allow us to work towards the CCSS Mathematics Practice Standards of persevering and critiquing other students\u2019 work.<\/p>\n

Elias\u2019 Two Question Rule<\/strong> isn\u2019t just as simple as asking a follow-up question, but makes the assumption that students want to see if when you ask a question the first time, you really wanted to know what they wanted to say.\u00a0 For example, in most mathematics classrooms, students are accustomed to the I-R-E form of dialogue which is short for Initiation-Response-Evaluation (Teacher-Student-Teacher) where the teacher generally knows that answer that they want for the question they have asked (kids know this, they\u2019re not dumb).\u00a0 So when the same old kids do the response part of this, instead of just doing the evaluation part, why not blindside them and actually rephrase the question and ask it again in a different way, or ask one kid themselves individually in order for them to know that you really want to hear from them?\u00a0 I think that\u2019s what Elias is talking about.\u00a0 (or even better don\u2019t use IRE, break that darn habit, I know I\u2019m still trying to!)<\/p>\n

We had some great fun during my workshops role modeling and just trying out different ways of questioning the mock student who was at the board \u2013 it\u2019s hard to break old habits.\u00a0 But the more we are aware of what we are trying to do and do it deliberately, the more important it becomes and bigger agents of change we can be as well. If you have any thoughts on these questioning techniques in math PBL classroom – please let me know<\/p>\n

Hmelo-Silver & Barrows (2006). Goals and strategies of a PBL Facilitator. Int<\/i>erdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning <\/i>, 1(1), 21-39<\/h6>\n\n
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Returning from a week-long conference is always invigorating for me \u2013 not for the reasons that many people think.\u00a0 I do appreciate the great feedback I get from my \u201cteacher-students\u201d that I interact with during the week who are so extremely eager to learn about PBL \u2013 this truly invigorates me and allows me to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6,72,19],"tags":[32,31,74,113,21,73],"class_list":["post-943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-the-classroom","category-problem-based-learning","category-questioning","category-relational-pedagogy","tag-appreciation","tag-conference","tag-learning","tag-questioning","tag-teaching","tag-workshops"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":951,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions\/951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.carmelschettino.com\/dev0418\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}