Thursday, May 2, 2013

Who's Asking The Questions In Your Classroom?

Some of the most meaningful and useful professional learning sessions share ideas/strategies that you can take away and immediately implement.  That's what Liz Malone (GT Facilitator & SEM Coordinator) and Cooper Hilton (Assistant Principal) set out to do yesterday afternoon for the educators at Austin Elementary.  They presented a session on promoting student questioning.  This was yet another piece of learning brought back from the National Learning Forward Conference they attended this past December.

The information and technique from their session came from a book called Make Just One Change: Teach Students To Ask Their Own Questions by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana and is based around the Question Formulation Technique.




Check out their Slide Rocket presentation HERE.

As part of the process in determining where we stood as a campus (what percentage of questions are student generated) and where we want to be as a campus (what percentage of questions SHOULD be student generated), Liz and Cooper experimented with a simple polling tool KwiqPoll.  It's an easy way to gather quick data using any device (iPhone, computer, etc) and could be a great formative assessment tool in classrooms.

If you would like more information on how the Question Formulation Technique could impact your classroom, leave us a comment!