I was recently asked to run a PD on supporting students to ask better questions. This sent me down a pretty deep rabbit hole looking into the research. Probably the most interesting thing I discovered in that burrow was T1, a fantastic post by Jon Gustafson on the history of Cognitive Strategy Instruction (think ‘reading comprehension strategies' like ‘find the main idea', etc) and the relationship between such strategy instruction and students' background knowledge. T1 is well worth reading! (Edit: I've included as T13 my process of reading research, asking teachers, drafting a PD session, for anyone who's keen to read that).

T2 offers a fantastic insight into how some charter schools achieve incredibly high results, and it isn't what I initially anticipated!

T3 is a simple strategy (very simple) for helping students to more effectively select solution methods in mathematics.

T4 delves into the rich research on worked examples.

If you're interested in teacher pay in Australia, the use of document cameras in the classroom, or implementation science, there's plenty for you to check out in T5, 6, and 7.

And for a tasty introduction into the linguistically witty book ‘Elements of Eloquence' check out the ‘viral' blogpost by it's author @inkyfool in T8!

I'll leave you to navigate the rest of the takeaways on your lonesome…

As mentioned, for the curious, I've included my journey down the ‘student questioning' rabbit hole as the final takeaway

Enjoy : )

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Tracing the Origins: ‘Reading Comprehension Strategies', via @MrGmpls

This is the initial tweet that lead me to Jon's work…

The Secret to Charter Schools' Success (or that of Success Academy anyway), via @rpondiscio

Flowcharts for maths, making implicit strategy decisions explicit, via @riley_ed

What's better, complete or partially worked examples? ht @dylanwiliam

Teacher Pay in Australia: the story in three simple charts, via @ConversationEdu

Thread on the power of using visualisers (document cameras) in the classroom, via @Mr_Raichura

Implementation Science resources to check out, (with input from @mic_epstein, @tvaughanEdu @tomcain @liv2learn)

A taste of the excellent book ‘Elements of Eloquence', by @inkyfool

Relationships at School: The Adults, via @teacherhead

Are NAPLAN maths tests pitched too low for students? (see the comment thread too)

Fun fact: the difference between pre- and post-atomic bomb steel? via @Garrodactyl

Cool quote: The inevitability of muddled thinking in maths

Student questioning, Ollie goes down the rabbit hole on the journey to design a PD session…

The following three step process, reading some research, asking some colleagues what they think is important, designing a workshop, is the steps I took to plan for a (as yet unrealised) PD session on ‘supporting students to ask better questions' that I was asked to run (Note: I didn't pick this topic). Thought I'd include it as I'd already compiled these notes and I thought that some readers might be interested in the research thread/thought process that I went through to plan this PD. I'll note that the process wasn't that structured and could definitely be improved. I essentially started from something I remembered being good, and followed my nose from there. But it definitely surfaced some interesting stuff, including T1 from this week!

The rabbit hole…

  • I started off with Ciardielo’s paper, Ciardiello, A. (1998) Did You Ask a Good Question Today? Alternative Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies. 1–11. (I had this paper saved from my Uni days and I remembered that I thought it was good at the time, so started there)
    • From this I was introduced to one strategy for question generation, which is helping students to understand different question types.
  • From Ciardiello’s paper I looked through the references and read a summary of the research from Rosenshine and colleagues, Rosenshine, B., Meister, C. & Chapman, S. (1996) Teaching students to generate questions: A review of the intervention studies. Review of Educational Research. 66 (2), 181–221.
    • From this I found that question categories is just one method of teaching students to ask better questions, there are many others, such as  signal words, question stems (and generic questions), ‘main idea’ approaches, question types, and story grammar categories. Rosenshine and colleagues concluded that signal words and question stems/generic questions were the most effective approaches to teaching students to ask questions, but the studies from which they drew these conclusions were a bit patchy.
  • From that research review, I tweeted a passage, https://twitter.com/ollie_lovell/status/1169134065984909312
  • Someone, Jon Gustafson, replied with a blog post he’d written on the topic: https://mrgmpls.wordpress.com/2019/07/29/tracing-the-origins-reading-comprehension-strategies/
    • Within that article, Jon explained how questioning forms part of the wider literature on cognitive strategy instruction.
    • Another important thing highlighted in Jon’s article was cognitive strategy instruction is an answer to the question of ‘well, what if the teacher can’t break it down for the student?’, as Rosenshine writes (from Gustafson’s blog post):
      • “The concepts from the teacher effects research were very useful when we could break a task into series of explicit steps, guide student practice on those steps, and provide support, feedback, and practice to enable students to respond at a high level of success.
      • But the concepts from the teacher effects research seemed less useful for teaching tasks that could not be broken into explicit steps, tasks such as reading comprehension.”
      • -Rosenshine (1997)
    • There were some good links in Gustafson’s post too, so I checked out this one: Dole, J.A., Nokes, J.D. & Drits, D. (2009) 16 Cognitive Strategy Instruction. Handbook of research on reading comprehension. 347.
      • In relation to the Rosenshine quote above (Cog strategies are useful when teacher can’t break down instruction into small steps), it becomes increasingly clear that very little of this cognitive strategy research focusses on anything other than cognitive strategies (question generation) for reading. Even when this chapter by Dole and colleagues looks at cognitive strategy instruction within science and history, it’s still focussed upon supporting students to read complex scientific or historical texts…
    • Given that Reciprocal Teaching is one of the most prominent cognitive strategy instructional approaches, and that this is something that is already a priority within my school (I'll note that this priority was set before my time), I felt that a logical next step would be to examine the research in this space more thoroughly. As such, I read Rosenshine's paper on this topic: Rosenshine, B., & Meister, C. (1994). Reciprocal teaching: A review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 64, 479–530.
      • One main thing coming out of this paper is as follows
        • We suggest that the main weakness in the practice of reciprocal teaching is that not enough has been written on implementation. There is no checklist of criteria for assessing the quality of reciprocal teaching instruction, and we found it difficult to evaluate the quality of the reciprocal teaching in the studies we reviewed. (pg. 520)
      • To explore this issue further, it may be worth checking out Palincsar’s research on what makes effective dialogues during reciprocal teaching
        • Palincsar and her associates (Palincsar, 1986; Palincsar et al., 1989) attempted to describe the important instructional features of dialogues by comparing the dialogues of several primary teachers
      • INTERESTINGLY: There’s a reciprocal teaching dialogue at the bottom of this Rosenshine paper, that’s been created by Palincsar. It’s pretty interesting, and well worth a read if you're interested in reciprocal teaching and how the initial designers intended for it to be used, but it takes a ‘main idea question’ approach, which Rosenshine’s subsequent (1996) summary of questioning research indicated is not necessarily the best bet.
    • I then checked out the contents of the book from which the Dole chapter is taken to see if there’s any specific chapters on teaching questioning. The book is Israel, S. E., & Duffy, G. G. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of research on reading comprehension. Routledge.
      • But, this book is set off some warning bells, see this chapter: Helping Readers Make Sense of Print: Research that Supports a Whole Language Pedagogy 91 KENNETH S. GOODMAN AND YETTA M. GOODMAN
      • Ok, that book seemed to be a bit of a dead end. I’ve now got a bit of a mental framework with which to approach this stuff now. Now to ask teachers their thoughts (what do they want from the session?), and check out some resources from a colleague.

Teacher opinions

  • Teacher 1
    • Students may not know how to ask Qs, so if it’s more specific task-word questions.
    • Is it important?
    • How to create that environment for questioning?
    • How to do it? (Sentence starters)
    • Different ways to respond to students’ questions…
  • Teacher 2
    • Students are shy, even though they haven’t understood, they’ll say yes. How to build that culture. Something to train them to become not shy.
    • This teacher notes that students can’t ask Qs, or ask bad Qs, if they just haven’t been focussing.
  • Teacher 3
    • This teacher feels it’s about culture…
    • How do we get students to understand that, by asking questions, they’re improving their understanding, and it gives feedback to the teachers also.
    • Tam tried with the question stems, e.g., Remembering Q is about the Ws…
  • Teacher 4
    • Culture
  • Teacher 5
    • At junior, it’s more about interest. School is just an interruption between recess and lunch.
    • There’s an ‘I’m dumb if I’m not asking questions’, thing…

Consensus? The main issue that teachers perceive is less about what or how students should be asking questions, but the pre-requisites for asking any questions at all… the culture!

Creating a culture of error/questioning (random thoughts and resources)

The proposed presentation

  • Open with the story of Isidore Rabi (From TEAL reading (shared by someone whom I was co-planning this session with) but perhaps more poetically presented in the Ciardiello paper)
  • Talk about how we spoke to teachers about getting students asking questions in their classrooms, and how the main issue highlighted by teachers was that it’s more an issue of classroom culture, students don’t feel comfortable asking questions.
  • Split teachers into small groups (groups of unfamiliar people…), Have them play a small game first to get to know each other.
  • Give them the Culture of Error Ebook reading, have them read it in small groups.
    • Immediately after the reading, get them to rate their understanding of the reading (or give a small questionnaire)
  • Introduce King’s Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning prompts (again, from the TEAL reading) and get them to generate their own questions about the reading, and to do this with each other in pairs within the small groups.
    • After this activity, get them to again rate their understanding of the reading (or give a small questionnaire, did the questioning prompts, that we suggest they could use with their students, help them to understand? (i.e., teachers take on the role of the learner to try out the strategies we're suggesting might be effective).
  • Bring everyone together as a group and invite teachers to reflect upon the impact of the questioning prompts… were they useful.
  • Further, invite them to also reflect upon the reading, was it helpful at all?
  • Facilitators take the stage and bring the threads together by explicitly sharing some additional strategies for creating a classroom culture conducive to questioning. Including, but not limited to
    • How we use talk
      • Summarise the Lemov reading
    • The tasks that we set
    • How we shape other students’ behaviour
      • E.g., What do we say when a student sniggers at another one’s response
      • Helping students to get to know each other, refer back to the small game that we got the groups to play, and highlight the impact that such a ‘getting to know you’ activity can have to building a culture where students feel safe to ask a question.
    • How we deal with our own mistakes
      • Also relating back to the Lemov reading
    • Close by giving teachers some reflection time and a template sheet that asks them to do the following
      • Pick a line or phrase that they encountered today that they liked and would like to try out in their classroom, a line that supports student questioning and a culture where asking questions (and making mistakes) is the norm.
      • Pick an activity or action to use in their classroom that supports student questioning.
      • Ask your students if you have a ‘tell’
      • If possible, plan a time to observe one of your partners whilst they utilise their new strategy.
      • Plan/invite a few teachers to report back next session.

Related

One Reply to “TOT090: The history of reading comprehension strategies, how charter schools achieve, + more Twitter Takeaways”

  • Hi Ollie,
    An honor to be included in this mix!

    I first heard of Cognitive Strategy Instruction and Reciprocal Teaching in Dylan Wiliam’s Embedded Formative Assessment book – specifically the chapter on “Activating Students as Learning Resources.”

    I then came across the “Handbook of Research on Reading Comprehension” after reading Dole’s earlier thesis on the same topic. While I also raised my eyebrows at the inclusion of the Goodman’s chapter in this collection (and the critique of the Simple View of Reading…), I was most interested in Dole’s work because she seemed to have a valuable perspective on how these strategies had gotten out of hand in their implementation. I wouldn’t devalue her contributions because of others included in the anthology!

    My main unresolved question is still – how do we get students to meaningfully interact with texts…beyond throwing comprehension questions at students and including robust vocabulary instruction. What are a few key strategies (summarizing while reading, asking questions) that can be explicitly taught and used with texts that a student has sufficient background knowledge in to access?

    I think the biggest issue with summarizing and question generation in classrooms is that teachers ask students to do all of this far too soon. In my experience, I spend a first day reading and re-reading a text with my class. That first day I then guide them through note-taking and summarization using a Writing Revolution type framework. On the second day, that is when I start asking students to respond to comprehensions I’ve created, and to then generate questions – initially with heavily scaffolded stems. My guess is that most teacher’s rush this process, and try to do it all at once?

    Anyhow – looking forward to your podcast with Wexler!
    -Jon

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