Thursday, February 24, 2011

LATS 2011 Questioning

Learning at Schools 2011 Questioning
Trevor Bond

This was an excellent session, very thought-provoking and informative. I created a Google Doc of my notes which can be accessed here:

I lked the levels of questioning which provided a scaffold for both the teaching and assessing of questioning skills. One very good point that he made was the importance of modelling, that by asking and answering poor questions we reinforce them. He has also developed a rubric to aid this assessment. http://question-skills.wikispaces.com/The+QuESTioning+Rubric

Another valuable point he made was the importance of both open and closed questions. There has been a tendency by some to negate the importance of closed questions when in fact they can be very valuable. They can save us a lot of work for example by eliminating some options. Many of the subsidiary questions for inquiry are closed questions and are needed to answer the Key question.

The other main point I agreed with was that inquiry does not always have to involve huge, rich, fertile questions. Yes these are great and once or twice a year a rich inquiry is extremely valuable, but there is a place for many smaller authentic inquiries. An example might be "How can we keep our cloakbay tidy? This might only last a few hours but could something that is really relevant to students and result in a large number of inquiry skills being developed.

Trevor has developed a questioning wiki http://ictnz.com/Questioning.htm which is well worth a look.
Learning at Schools 2011 Trevor Bond - Good Inquiry Good Learning 
My notes can be viewed in a Google Doc 

Trevor made a very good distinction between 
Celebration of the Found - celebrating what students found out abut the topic and Celebration of the Understood - celebrating what students did with the info http://ictnz.com/Inquiry%20Learning/good%20inquiry%20learning.htm#celebrationoffound These two concepts were coined by Dr Ross Todd

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