Formulating Great Questions

[Porridge]

This is a spinoff from @lewelma's Designing Your Own Curriculum thread, and from @8FillTheHeart's encouragement for us (the Hive) to discuss these issues.

I think one of the most important ways we can help our DC learn is to ask good questions and teach them how to formulate good answers. We can call it the socratic method, or CM style narration, or any number of names. I'm more interested in the how.  My problem is that I don't know how to formulate good questions.

I can do it for science. Last year, I took BFSU and broke the lessons down into a series of questions-of-the-day. The kids enjoyed it and learned a lot. (I haven't done that yet for this year, because I have all these great ideas but I'm so horribly behind on actual planning an implementation....) But I really struggle with formulating good questions in the humanities - lit, history.

I would love to design our homeschool year around quality questions.  I was thinking of having a question of the day / week / month related to whatever the kids are reading or studying, to help focus our discussions and their writing.  For example, if we're learning American history, here are some sample questions I found on the Gilder Lehman website:

•  Has America lived up to its ideals as “a land of opportunityâ€?
• ï‚·  Was colonial America democratic?
• ï‚·  Would you have been a revolutionary in 1776?
• ï‚·  Could the Constitution be written without compromise?
• ï‚·  Was George Washington’s leadership indispensable in the founding of the United States?
• ï‚·  What made Americans want to go west?

 

For reference, my DD is 12, DS is 10. I think they're ready to move beyond simple narration to this kind of thinking. 

How do you formulate questions that challenge your DC to think analytically, critically, synthetically?

What kids of questions are appropriate for the grammar vs. logic vs. rhetoric stage?

 

[8filltheheart]

My approach is a combination of the Jesuit pedagogy of prelection/reflection/active learning/repetition and critical thinking questions designed to move thoughts up to the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy.  Section 13 of this book covers the Jesuit pedagogy.  I have adapted prelection to include my role as a non-expert homeschooling mom.  (This ties in to @square_25's question about weaknesses and super powers.  My weakness is to be lazy and to disengage and let curriculum carry the load.)  When I am desiging courses, I must clearly understand the objectives for what I want them to study.  It forces me to internalize the very skills that prelection has as a goal for the student (this is brief overview of prelection):

Quote

In this traditional method, teachers follow the same procedure as the retreat director, i.e., giving a short account of the matter to be studied but being careful not to substitute their activity for the self-activity of the student. It is a patterned approach which prepares students by giving them the tools necessary to become effectively active.

Among the procedures employed in Jesuit education, the prelection traditionally was a technique of major importance and wide application. It was regarded as one of the keys to the “Jesuit Method” in education.

DEFINITION The prelection is a preview of a future assignment conducted by the teacher with the active cooperation of the class. It is not a lecture but a prelude to and preparation for private study.

PURPOSE

1.  to interest the student in the subject under investigation;
2.  to see precise and obtainable objectives for the assignment;
3. to point out the more important or complicated parts of the assignment.

 VALUES

1. assists private study; starts the mind working on the subject matter;
2.  simultaneously equips the student with a method for attacking the lesson and insists that the student do the work.

PROCEDURES Teachers carefully prepare and select the comments they will make in the prelection; the teacher does not merely offer impromptu remarks about the next assignment. The prelection should include:

1. he objective or results expected from the assignment;
2.  the connection of the lesson with previous lessons;
3. the special problems in this assignment which need explanation, definition, illustration;
4. the major ideas to be understood;
5. the method the student should use in approaching the subject matter;
6. defects of previous study or potential problems which need to be avoided;
7. the criteria by which students will know that they have mastered the lesson.

The teacher must remember that the goal is to stimulate and aid the student to self-activity; the teacher should say no more in the prelection than what is necessary to accomplish this purpose.

You can google Bloom's taxonomy verbs or questions and get 100s of hits.  Here are a few to get you started:

http://www.mandela.ac.za/cyberhunts/bloom.htm

http://faculty.academyart.edu/faculty/teaching-topics/teaching-curriculum/enhancing-teacher-student-interaction/different-types-questions-blooms-taxonomy.html

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

I don't suppose you have a nice list of your BFSU questions that you'd like to share?  

This is a really interesting idea.  I think another way to look at what you're describing is to really dig into the big ideas, as opposed to just the facts.  I've just started reading The Writing Revolution (still in chapter 1) but I did an exercise from the foreword where we took a kernel sentence and expanded it three ways, using "but" (contrast),  "so," (consequence), and "because" (cause and effect) clauses.  I was so impressed with the connections my kids made in this easy ten minute follow-up to our history reading.  I knew they could define "manifest destiny," but completing the kernel "Manifest destiny was a doctrine many American's believed in..." rally gave me a good idea of whether they had integrated the idea well into the context of what we'd been learning.  

[Little Green Leaves]

It's a lot easier for me to come up with ideas for the humanities (history, language, etc) than for the sciences. I mean, I have a lot of questions about science but they aren't as well formulated. They're way too open-ended, or hard to tackle, or too narrow.

 

So this makes me think that it's easier to come up with questions when you spend a lot of time learning about a subject. I guess the more time you spend taking in information, the better you'll be at framing questions.

 

I would also love to see your list of science-related questions!

[Lecka]

I have had a list of questions from different levels of Bloom's taxonomy.  

A link from google:  http://faculty.academyart.edu/faculty/teaching-topics/teaching-curriculum/enhancing-teacher-student-interaction/different-types-questions-blooms-taxonomy.html

I have also looked at questions from Fountas and Pinnell.

A link from google:  https://www.cabarrus.k12.nc.us/cms/lib/NC01910456/Centricity/Domain/9952/Leveled_Comprehension_Questions.pdf\

 

I do get ideas from stuff like this.

Edited June 20, 2020 by Lecka

[EKS]

14 hours ago, JHLWTM said:

• Has America lived up to its ideals as “a land of opportunityâ€?
• ï‚·  Was colonial America democratic?
• ï‚·  Would you have been a revolutionary in 1776?
• ï‚·  Could the Constitution be written without compromise?
• ï‚·  Was George Washington’s leadership indispensable in the founding of the United States?
• ï‚·  What made Americans want to go west?

I would argue that these are ill-formed questions if you're looking for thinking on the part of the student.  Here is how I'd rewrite them:

• How has the United States lived up to its ideals as "a land of opportunity" throughout its history?
• How has the practice of democracy evolved since colonial times (or since some other time)?
• What does it mean to be a "revolutionary"?
• How does compromise manifest in the the political process?
• What does it mean to be a "leader"?
• How important are individuals to the arc of history?
• How might a person assess the risks and benefits of migration? 

 

[8filltheheart]

12 minutes ago, EKS said:

I would argue that these are ill-formed questions if you're looking for thinking on the part of the student.  Here is how I'd rewrite them:

• How has the United States lived up to its ideals as "a land of opportunity" throughout its history?
• How has the practice of democracy evolved since colonial times (or since some other time)?
• What does it mean to be a "revolutionary"?
• How does compromise manifest in the the political process?
• What does it mean to be a "leader"?
• How important are individuals to the arc of history?
• How might a person assess the risks and benefits of migration? 

 

Absolutely agree.

A simple way for the OP to think about this is that questions cannot have answers that include yes or no as part of their answer. They must force the student to process their thoughts to articulate a supported response.

 

Edited June 20, 2020 by 8FillTheHeart

[medawyn]

My thoughts on questions derive from two sources.  The first was my own entrance into undergrad.  When I arrived, I quickly realized that I was ill equipped to formulate good questions; to a class, all of my professors required us to generate our own paper topics.  For some, these were weekly reflections on the reading; for others these were cumulative research papers for the semester.  I was an excellent writer, but my high school had always started us with a choice of essay prompts.  I managed, but I learned that asking good questions is a skill that for most is easier if learned and practice over time.  The second source was my time as a graduate student at St. John's College, which is a program literally built around asking questions.  Almost to a fault, the driving pedagogical method is to ask a question and allow students to wrestle with it.  So for me, questions land in three categories: 1) As a teacher, formulating good questions that allow students to reveal their knowledge, make connections, and push forward, (2) As a student, formulate good questions to push the edges of learning and also to judge what questions suit which academic situations and (3) As a human being, asking questions that push personal understanding of the world and of self.

So, if you are focusing on the first type of questions, Bloom's Taxonomy is really helpful.  It gives you a vocabulary to assess knowledge in different ways, and it helps you learn to ask questions that require students to dig deeper into the material and their own thoughts about the material.  But one of the limits of Blooms is that it's teacher driven; the purpose of the question is largely to have the student demonstrate the limits of their understanding.

When I taught 8th grade, I used several approaches to questions that I hoped would help broaden understanding.  The first is that each quarter loosely had a theme in my mind.  For example, when we read Night and The Hobbit the loose theme in my mind was courage.  There were opportunities to compare character's reactions or choices, to define courage for a single character, for a single book, to probe a general definition of courage, to evaluate personal courage.  Courage certainly wasn't the theme of every piece of writing or every conversation, but if I had 3-4 short writing opportunities and 2-3 really focused classroom discussions, I was able to guide the students towards the idea that courage was a virtue worth thinking about over time.  The second and easiest kind of question was the assessing knowledge kind; we had lots of opportunities for me to ask for specific pieces of writing or focused discussion with questions that would fit in various levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.  These questions were very effective in eliciting knowledge and also could lead to some good conversations, but they usually had "an answer" at the end.  The third exercise I used all year long was to have students generate their own questions.  At least once a week, instead of producing a paragraph of writing, the students would submit five of their own questions about what they had read.  This was truly a year long project.  The first few months were *awful*.  (What color is the door of Bilbo's house? Who did ______?) I scaffolded and talked a lot about different kinds of questions.  We would compile a list and sort them into questions that had straightforward answers (fact based or easily researched), questions that had no answer (what was long dead author thinking when he wrote _____?), and questions that made us think deeply and didn't have a single answer or an easy answer.  These last questions got sorted into groups: which questions would be good to ask for a short response paper? Which questions would be good to ask for a longer essay? Which questions forced us to learn more about the topic and bring other information into the discussion? Which questions pushed us to think more about *why* we thought or believed or wondered something? Which questions lead to more questions?  The emphasis at the time was definitely more on helping them craft questions to use in their academic career, but that was largely because my job was to help them be successful high school students.  At home, my emphasis will be much more on character building, preserving curiosity, and philosophy.

This is a long and complicated way to say that questions are fun.  Really big questions take a long time to think about and require lots of revisiting.  This is easy and hard in a homeschool setting, because you have lots of freedom to follow rabbit trails and come back to the really interesting questions.  It's hard because usually you only have one student facing the brunt of the question, so there has to be a big effort on the part of the parent to become part of the dialog rather than just the one asking and passively waiting for the answers.  The 

 

[8filltheheart]

@medawyn Your post reminds me of a lecture given by Peter Kreeft. He said he'd have students ask him to assign them their essay topics and his response was no way bc that was  at least 1/2 the work.  🙂

[Lecka]

I think questions that have more specific answers can serve a purpose, too.  
 

I think goals about what purpose is being reached go into what kind of questions to ask.

Sometimes the goal might be remembering information or recognizing something, and that is okay when that is an appropriate goal.

I like the “n+1” question a lot of the time, building on what the child knows.  
 

 

[Porridge]

Thanks, @8FillTheHeart this is very helpful.

I think I had asked a different type of question once, and you provided helpful links to sites that discusses how to engage in socratic questioning. The Bloom's framework somehow seems easier for me to digest. I've printed the content from the pages you linked so I can study them and have them on hand as "cheat sheets" for my discussions with the kids.

 (Here they are, reformatted for printing, in case anyone else wants to print them out - I placed the citations / original link URLS at the end) 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CGp6JtG4shZ9Xz_t9mIhMFM5WJO1ijdM/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14GtosA3vnC90gS7TnH0ZDYyq0PXjK2WQ/view?usp=sharing

I've read some of the prior posts discussing prelection in the past, and have tried to implement the approach (or my imperfect understanding of it). My trouble comes in this: 

23 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:

When I am desiging courses, I must clearly understand the objectives for what I want them to study.  It forces me to internalize the very skills that prelection has as a goal for the student

 

In order for me to clearly understand the objectives for what I want them to study, I feel like I need to read all the books and study them deeply myself. Of course this would be ideal, but I simply don't have the time. How does one develop a sense of what the objectives for learning should be for any given child at any given stage? I know it's in some ways an impossible question to answer, but I'm curious as to whether anyone has a ready response.  I think my approach up til now has very much paced with each child - I know where they're at, and try to push them a little bit further at each stage. That was easier in the grammar stage, when I felt I had a pretty good idea of what kinds of skills they needed to pick up. As we move into logic, I just feel confused. I have a hard time remembering what it was like to be in middle school, and I don't have  clear sense of which skills build one which other skills, and how to appropriately challenge the kids. Throw into the mix the fact that both kids are very bright, but push back in different ways, and I don't know whether they're pushing back because I'm asking too much of them, or if they're pushing back because they are uncomfortable but appropriately challenged.

Maybe I am putting too much pressure on myself, as @square_25 suggested - I have been known to have perfectionist tendencies 🙂 But I do find things less straightforward now compared to when they were younger, especially with my 12 year old. 

 

[Porridge]

6 hours ago, medawyn said:

So for me, questions land in three categories: 1) As a teacher, formulating good questions that allow students to reveal their knowledge, make connections, and push forward, (2) As a student, formulate good questions to push the edges of learning and also to judge what questions suit which academic situations and (3) As a human being, asking questions that push personal understanding of the world and of self.

@medawyn, your post was so full of good things to think about - I'll be chewing on it for awhile. 

I find your 3 categories of questions to be a very helpful framework. I think category 3 isn't hard for us. We have a "morning basket" type of thing in our homeschool (though it's not necessarily a morning thing) where we read and discuss from our faith tradition, Shakespeare, history / literature, etc.  The focus of these discussions is similar to what you mentioned --  "character building, preserving curiosity, and philosophy."

Category 2 had never clearly occurred to me -- it's not just cognition, it's meta cognition on the part of the student.  It's exactly what I want for my children. Part of me thought that as long as they were intellectually curious, they'd ask the right questions, but I think you're right - learning to ask good questions requires modeling and coaching. I love the idea of having the kids generate their own questions, then having us discuss the questions together. 

--

6 hours ago, medawyn said:

It's hard because usually you only have one student facing the brunt of the question, so there has to be a big effort on the part of the parent to become part of the dialog rather than just the one asking and passively waiting for the answers.  The 

This is challenging. I find that my DC want to give very simplistic answers. I've tried to model the kind of thinking I hope for them to develop (or at least try) but sometimes that feels like I'm (paraphrasing from @8FillTheHeart's post above about prelection) "substituting my activity for the self-activity of the student."  I don't know how to get around that. I'd appreciate hearing how others think about this.

 

[Porridge]

10 hours ago, Little Green Leaves said:

It's a lot easier for me to come up with ideas for the humanities (history, language, etc) than for the sciences. I mean, I have a lot of questions about science but they aren't as well formulated. They're way too open-ended, or hard to tackle, or too narrow.

 

So this makes me think that it's easier to come up with questions when you spend a lot of time learning about a subject. I guess the more time you spend taking in information, the better you'll be at framing questions.

 

I would also love to see your list of science-related questions!

 I'd love to share them, but I didn't type them! I wrote in pencil directly in my BFSU book. It would take quite awhile to go back to pull them all out, but here's a sample from BFSU lesson A-13 on Atomic and molecular Motion: (some are questions directly posed by Nebel, the author of BFSU, others are questions I generated to use alongside BFSU). 

"Show video of starting a fire with a fire piston. Ask, how does this work?"  Discuss temp - pressure- volume relationships.

Can you draw a model or diagram showing the relationship between Temp-press-volume? 

"Why should pushing particles closer together (reducing volume) result in increasing temp?"

What happens when we increase the volume of a gas? What happens to Temp? Pressure? Why? Can you draw a picture?

Is the change in temp resulting from a change in Press permanent? Why or why not?

Can a gas at high Press and a gas at low Press be at the same temp?

"Why should we go through the trouble of liquefying gases?"

How does a refrigerator work?

What is insulation?

How could we test the efficiency of different types of insulation?

 

We discussed 1-2 questions per day, not necessarily every day.

 

[8filltheheart]

11 hours ago, JHLWTM said:

In order for me to clearly understand the objectives for what I want them to study, I feel like I need to read all the books and study them deeply myself. Of course this would be ideal, but I simply don't have the time. How does one develop a sense of what the objectives for learning should be for any given child at any given stage?

When I am designing my kids courses, I think in terms of why this subject? why this book?  why spend time with this resource?  If I can't clearly articulate to myself what I want them in mastering specific content, then I cannot articulate to them why I want them to spend time with the ideas.  I do not have to read every page of every resource.  I spend time skimming parts of every book we use when deciding that it makes it into our "will read" pile.  I spend more time with it again when I am framing our pace through different resources.  I spend even more time again when generating daily lesson plans.  I write notes to myself about ideas for additional research, weekly objectives, references I want to make sure we discuss, etc.  With my older kids' materials, I am often reading through GC booklets, looking at the additional resources suggested, researching synopses online, or even Cliffnote/Sparknote or other other references online.  I can grasp enough of what they are covering (or by this point have enough of a mental reference already) to ask leading questions or purely open-ended teach me what you know type questions.  I also have a HUGE BS detector.  I can ask enough probing questions that I can tell whether or not they firmly grasp what they are discussing.  When in doubt, I say let's sit down and look up some of the things you just said.  This is not a confrontational type scenario, just a let's learn what we can about X.  As we look things up, I ask them more questions.

It has worked well enough for us.My kids are used to having to orally "defend" (for lack of better terminology) what they believe that they understand.  It also opens up topics for more research. (My kids are writing essays across curriculum and often their essays come from topics that they need or want to explore more deeply.)

Edited June 21, 2020 by 8FillTheHeart

[8filltheheart]

1 hour ago, JHLWTM said:

 

This is challenging. I find that my DC want to give very simplistic answers. I've tried to model the kind of thinking I hope for them to develop (or at least try) but sometimes that feels like I'm (paraphrasing from @8FillTheHeart's post above about prelection) "substituting my activity for the self-activity of the student."  I don't know how to get around that. I'd appreciate hearing how others think about this.

 

Don't forget that prelection is meant to guide the student in what they are getting ready to study. For example,  I often ask the questions before they start working.  For example, when reading Paradise Lost, I told dd that she should pay attention to how Satan is physically protrayed as the poem progresses.  By the end of the poem, she was animated in her discussion about how he diminished in size and became more and more bound to the earth.  My comments were "prelection." That was a major point I wanted her to pay attention to, so she did.  As she encountered each shape he assumed, she made notes to herself and compared them as we went along. That was her "self-activity." If I had pointed out as we read the poem his different shapes and how did that compare to the last one, etc, I would have been "substituting my activity for the self-activity of the student."

Does that help?

[Lecka]

I think there is an independent level and a “with help” level.

Maybe try some things that are easier and kids can be more independent.  
 

I think providing a model is good when kids are engaged.  
 

For one thing, there can be a “zone of proximal development” where kids can learn a lot at a level where they can’t quite do it on their own, but can with a little help/feedback.

For another thing, there can be different purposes.  Sometimes a purpose can be for kids to be more independent with an easier level.  Sometimes a purpose can be to have more guidance at a harder level.

 

[Lori D.]

Loads of terrific stuff from previous posters! 😄 

My super-short answer would be to ask "how" and "why" questions, and practice backing up responses with reasons -- much like @Monica_in_Switzerland described doing with ideas from The Writing Revolution. "How" and "why" are the kinds of questions that lead to further inquiry, and hence, discussion. Things like:
- What's the connection between these people/ideas/events?
- Why did they do that/choose that/think that way? And what do I learn from that?
- How is __________ in this material like something we've seen before in a movie, book, history or science studies, or real life?

Check out this chart of 25 Question Stems Framed Around Bloom's Taxonomy -- for thinking/discussion types of questions, you'll want to look at sections 3-6. Below, I copy-pasted a few more ideas from a previous post of mine, in case it's of any help. Great topic! Warmest regards, Lori D.

___________________________________

- Practice through informally discussing the "why" and "how" of movies, politics/current events, and of everyday life.
("Why do YOU think he make that choice, and what might the consequences be?")
("How might that event affect the rest of the region?")
("What do you think her reasoning for that might be?")
("How will this choice/action affect others?")
("Would you have made a similar or different choice? Why?")
("What stands out to YOU from this lecture? Why was that significant to you?")

- Guided discussion; ask questions that encourage the student to:
* ask "why"
* understand sequence of events
* see/describe similarities/differences -- and a conclusion or result from having compared
* make connections
* look for cause and effect
* predict/guess what WILL happen, based on what has already happened

Try starting with compare/contrast, and with familiar topics to DS: the news; sports; TV shows or movies. From noticing what is similar or different, branch out to how these led to similar or different consequences, and then work backwards and discuss the character/personalities of the people making the choices that were similar/different, and then even see if you see a "big idea" (theme) that connects several of these events...


A few other things to consider:
Students don't start maturing in the analytical and logic portions of the brain until along about age 12-14, and will need a lot of scaffolding and guided questions into deeper thinking. They are *just* at the start of moving into the rhetoric stage, which is where you learn to have ideas, formulate thoughts, support your contention and then express it verbally or in writing. Independent thinking and discussion is a slow process that takes both the brain maturing into the ability to do so, coupled with lots of practice, and lots and lots and LOTS of (you) demonstrating how it's done. Keep plugging away doggedly at this and you will see a big difference in 2 years, 3 years, 4 years...

Ask leading questions. And follow up with more questions. Our DSs are smart, but were inexperienced in analysis at the middle school/early high school ages, so it really helped if I dropped hints/clues.  😉 

Consider making discussion less formal -- in the car, at the dinner table, or as one of you sees connections with what you're studying.

And,, boys esp. in that age range are notorious for being laconic when it comes to discussion. 😉 

Finally, "discussion" is hugely difficult when it's just you and one young teen student. If you can at ALL include siblings, friends, a co-op class, book club, etc., discussion is SO much easier with more people for potential input and to spark ideas from one another. Or, one mom would take turns, turning the teacher guide over to the student and let the student ask the questions and the mom would answer, which took pressure off of the student to always be "on" for answering questions, and allowed mom to model how to go about thinking through answering analysis questions.

Edited June 22, 2020 by Lori D.

[Lori D.]

5 hours ago, JHLWTM said:

How does one develop a sense of what the objectives for learning should be for any given child at any given stage? I know it's in some ways an impossible question to answer, but I'm curious as to whether anyone has a ready response.

I studied alongside/together with DSs. We did a large amount of school together, aloud, and discussed, discussed, discussed. That gave me a very immediate "finger on the pulse" of each student to know exactly where they were and what they needed. I know that is not realistic or possible for most people; I was fortunate in that DSs were 20 months apart, so we could do a huge part of our schooling all together. 😉 

Edited June 21, 2020 by Lori D.

[Porridge]

Thanks @8FillTheHeart and @Lori D. - very good stuff. I'm processing it and will probably circle back with follow up - didn't want you to think I didn't appreciate the input while I chew on this...