Creative Lesson: Question Evaluation

I have not really had any opportunity to do anything I would consider extremely out of the box, being constrained by the school’s curriculum (which had already been designed prior to our practicum posting). I have, however, tried to introduce new elements during the lessons on Question Generation (mentioned in my first post) as it is a relatively new thing that we are trying out. Given its newness, it is unsurprising that resources, guidelines, and structure for implementing Question Generation in the classroom are currently lacking. Some of the more experienced teachers in my team are now in the process of designing a Formative Assessment task requiring the students to demonstrate evidence of learned skills in generating questions. Honestly, I feel quite worried about the students’ ability to meet the demands of such an assessment when it is administered. Based on classroom interaction, my sense is that the whole idea of generating questions is still rather ill-defined, and it is really a result of both the teachers’ and the students’ uncertainty about this new process. Some of the stronger students have a better intuitive grasp of how to make their questions count, but quite distressingly many are still fumbling with questions that are lacking in either depth or clarity.

I decided, therefore, to devote one lesson in to giving students an opportunity to evaluate their own questions in a structured manner. This would require outlining a few simple criteria for them to weigh their questions with. For this lesson, I created a question evaluation form (see image above) that would allow students to work on a question of their own design. To keep things focused, I chose ‘literary elements’ questions and inserted the corresponding criteria into the form to guide the students’ thought process. This portion is meant to get students thinking about whether or not their questions had significance (depth)—literal/factual questions that do not really require much analysis will hopefully be ‘weeded out’ or at least improved on.   

Following this, students will be asked to answer the question they have generated. This is an indirect way of asking them what sort of insights they were trying to elicit through their line of questioning. One main problem I encountered during previous lessons was that many students’ phrasing of questions detracted from their actual intentions (i.e. they might be thinking of asking for certain aspects related to a literary element, but their phrasing of the question misleads the answerer into dwelling on other aspects, thus missing the ‘point’ of the question entirely). The next step would be for the students to direct their question to a friend, who will attempt to answer it either verbally or in written form. Students are to compare their own responses (to their own questions) with the responses their friend gave. This is intended to be a casual test of how clear their questions were. If their response and their friend’s response differed greatly, students will be asked to speculate on a plausible reason as to why their question was misunderstood (‘excuses’ such as ‘my friend is not concentrating’ or ‘she didn’t hear my question right’ will not be admitted). Often, re-phrasing, adding, or subtracting from the original question gave rise to improved clarity.

I have tried this lesson with two classes. For the first, I allowed them to use the form on their own, but this led to some confusion especially since students progressed at different speeds (some had to sit around to wait for their friends to be ‘free’ to answer their questions). I also discovered that some degree of modelling would help students to use the form better, and my second attempt doing this lesson was more organized. I showed the students step-by-step how I would work on a question, and gave them portions of time to accomplish each step so that no one rushed through/got left behind in the process.