This week in my graduate class, we have been reading about and discussing purposeful questioning. Question generation is a skill that I want to stress in my future classrooms, so it has been helpful to spend time learning about the questioning process and figuring out what to do and what to avoid in the classroom. Our text, Principles to Action: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All from the National Council of Teacher of Mathematics (NCTM), has outlined various levels of classroom discourse. In a Level 0 classroom, students only answer questions requiring short answers posed by the teacher. As the levels increase, students are asked more questions that rely on them to reflect on their thinking process. They are also given the opportunity to discuss and question their peers. At the highest level, Level 3, the teacher's role is simply as a facilitator of conversation, with the students doing most of the questioning and answering. In my ideal classroom, all discussions would be student-centered, like in the third level of the NCTM classroom discourse. In the 12th grade class that I am observing, the students are currently working on a project where they are creating a layout for a hospital emergency room that is supposed to help eliminate the problems found in many current ERs. For the majority of this project, the students are working in groups to come up with solutions to their problems and create their own designs. I have been able to observe students presenting ideas to their partners and then having a discussion about whether or not that idea would work, with little to no interference from myself or my mentor teacher. It has been interesting to see this level of discourse in action in a classroom and encourages me that I may be able to be successful creating this environment in the future.
In the younger, ninth grade class, the level of discourse is not this high. Often, the students are still given questions from the teacher to answer that deal mostly with small pieces of information. However, this does occasionally vary, specifically when it is clear that the class is having trouble getting a grasp on information. This week, the class watched a BrainPop video on the properties of water and then completed the quiz at the end as a class. One of the questions stumped the majority of the class and they could not agree on an answer. I was running this activity, so I guided the students through some thought processes to help them arrive at the right answer, but students were also talking among themselves to problem solve. One student took the initiative to look up the definition to a word in the question with which much of the class was not familiar. I noticed that students were more animated and engaged when I gave them the opportunity to problem solve rather than just simply rattle off the answer to the question. However, I had a student who tends to be disengaged with the class frustratedly ask me why I wouldn't just give them the answer instead of spending time having the students figure it out. One thing that seems clear to me is that many students aren't used to being in a classroom that is anything but Level 0 most of the time, so when they are asked to do more than just answer simple questions with clear answers, they feel confused and maybe even overwhelmed. I want to make sure to keep this in mind when I am in my own classroom so that I can slowly introduce the higher levels of discourse to get my students comfortable with the idea of discussion, answering open ended questions, and even creating questions to ask themselves.
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