Higher-Level Questioning
Ask any teacher and they'll agree on one thing... the greatest challenges they face is finding enough time to get everything done. One reason is in 2013-2014, the NJDOE approved the implementation of AchieveNJ, which set the new guidelines for teacher evaluation. Teachers now are evaluated 2-3 times per year and have to submit and implement SGO's and prepare their students for the PARCC test as many of the teachers now have SGP's. With this, teachers were now forced to prioritize their many job requirements and one very easy trap is to simply assign work out of textbooks. Almost every teacher knows about Bloom's Taxonomy and that we should be teaching our students higher-level thinking skills. However, knowing and doing are sometimes two different things and now that teachers are busier than ever, the textbook made low-level questions look pretty enticing. We have to resist!
Let me be clear, as a Social Studies teacher I HATED textbooks. They're big, heavy, boring, filled with the same boring stories that were in textbooks 50 years ago and most importantly not what students are interested in. But I digress, another reason I didn't like my Social Studies textbook is that the questions were generic, lower-level thinking questions. One of the best lines I've read on Higher-level questioning was this, "If everything you need to know to answer the question has already been provided to the students, it's not a high-level thinking question." This was absolutely true to my experience with my Social Studies textbook. We need to break the cycle of LEARN, TEST, FORGET, LEARN, TEST, FORGET, etc. By teaching students how to analyze, evaluate and synthesize information, we are teaching them life-long skills that they can apply to just about any job in any field. The content is not the most important thing we teach, it's the critical thinking skills that will prepare them for the ever-changing 21st century demands. The content will for the most part be forgotten but the critical thinking skills that have been drilled over and over and over again will stay with your students forever.
Albert Einstein said, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."
So how do we take the lower-level thinking questions found in the textbook and change it to require students to use higher-level critical thinking skill? Let's take a look at this infographic:
Let me be clear, as a Social Studies teacher I HATED textbooks. They're big, heavy, boring, filled with the same boring stories that were in textbooks 50 years ago and most importantly not what students are interested in. But I digress, another reason I didn't like my Social Studies textbook is that the questions were generic, lower-level thinking questions. One of the best lines I've read on Higher-level questioning was this, "If everything you need to know to answer the question has already been provided to the students, it's not a high-level thinking question." This was absolutely true to my experience with my Social Studies textbook. We need to break the cycle of LEARN, TEST, FORGET, LEARN, TEST, FORGET, etc. By teaching students how to analyze, evaluate and synthesize information, we are teaching them life-long skills that they can apply to just about any job in any field. The content is not the most important thing we teach, it's the critical thinking skills that will prepare them for the ever-changing 21st century demands. The content will for the most part be forgotten but the critical thinking skills that have been drilled over and over and over again will stay with your students forever.
Albert Einstein said, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."
So how do we take the lower-level thinking questions found in the textbook and change it to require students to use higher-level critical thinking skill? Let's take a look at this infographic:
As you can easily see, there aren't any yes or no questions as you move up towards the Creating questions. These are thought provoking, discussion driving, mentally engaging questions. Next time you assign a reading passage, come up with 2-3 higher-level thinking questions instead of the 10-15 lower-level fact recall questions. You will find that it takes just about the same amount of time and your students will be learning something far more important than the information in the reading passage. They will be learning how to critically think about that, or any reading passage!
Have a great week!
Have a great week!