Inquiry Basics: What do once I have learner questions?

Questions are synonymous with inquiry.

They are very thing that help us co design the learning with our students.

They are the very thing that help us learn what’s important to our learners.

They are the very thing that can help the learning feel connected and meaningful.

My close work with a group of fourth grade teachers has continued this school year. Our work with one another has ranged from student perspective about the role of questions in the classroom to teacher’s personal comfort level and skill in using questions to nudge student thinking and drive learning towards deeper and more complex levels.

We’re collaboratively learning with one another, unpacking the complexity of their professional goals through our own process of “finding out”.

We explored the use of provocations to spark curiosity, went on learning walks to other classrooms, implemented some thinking routines and other structures that support students as they analyze the different types of questions and, of course, engage in constant and ongoing reflection to make sense of our learning.

This week one of the teachers invited me into her classroom to take a closer look at how questioning was going with her students. She shared a group of questions that they generated for a Q&A session with an industry expert and as we sorted through the stack of notecards there were several observations we made with one another.

We noticed that a majority of the student questions were “closed”, starting with words such as “what is…” or “how many…”.

We noticed that only a small handful of students wrote questions that showed evidence of connected thinking to other topics, areas of interest or other knowledge outside the session.

We noticed many questions were quite similar with little variance in focus.

And finally, we noticed that the students fluency and ability of students to generate questions had greatly improved over the course of the school year. When prompted to share additional wonders after the session was over, students easily generated additional questions that she had documented in a padlet.

We’ve been more intentional with the space we’ve given questions in the classroom and the culture of questioning in this classroom is shifting. As we give more space for students to ask questions, what I find is just as valuable to settle into is the way that we use them to drive instruction and learning.

There is not one way to approach the use of questions in the classroom, yet one mindset that is. A mindset that’s playful, one that’s open and one that leads with the question, “What would happen if…”

• What would happen if we viewed these questions as a pre assessment that gave us the data to show us where we needed to start with our curriculum?

Most of the closed questions could easily be connected to the science curriculum that was coming up in the next month. We’d intentionally plan for the ways we’d lift these questions to the surface highlighting areas of interest and using the exact language from the students.

• What would happen if we asked student to engage in ongoing reflection and dialog about how their questions were shifting over the course of their learning?

Using the Question Continuum and Question Quadrant resources we had already introduced earlier in the year, we’d tack up these initial questions and then additional ones as the learning unfolded in the unit. We’d plan for several moments to slow down, to stop and to pause and reflect with our students further jotting down their thinking, ideas and noticing about their curiosities.

• What would happen if we made these questions not only visible to our students, but also visible to ourselves?

While Wonder Walls and question boards are quite essential in any inquiry classroom, they can also so easily blend into the background. Placing student questions into our plan books right next to the learning experiences we plan for is critical to helping us make connections to our students, planning with them in mind.

• What would happen if we were more intentional with our language, modeling our curiosity about their curiosities and the topics we were exploring with one another?

While planning, we’d carefully consider the sentence stems and questions we asked our students, starting questions with, “I’m wondering how ___ is connected to ___?”, “Why do you think that…?” or following their question with another question such as, “what makes you say that?”.

Our work as inquiry educators becomes more powerful when we do it together. Whether it be the reflective conversations we engage in with colleagues or very ones we have with our students, determining where we go next is always better when we consider multiple perspectives and invite other voices to the table to best determine where we go from here.

I’m curious to see what unfolds with the learning in this classroom.

I’m curious to see how these move impact the teacher in her practice.

And, I’m curious to hear what new questions the students ask.