Asking Questions

Increasingly, we are preparing students to live in a world where the jobs they will have may not even exist yet. How can we prepare them to be successful doing something we know nothing about? More and more, the answer is to focus on skill over content. We want to build our students into the high-level thinkers and into innovators.

In Eric Francis' book "Now that's a good question!: How to promote cognitive rigor through classroom questioning" there is a focus on how to move from content to skill through the questions we ask. It also has some good stuff on creating essential questions to be used for unit plans.

I really like how the book superimposing the two bodies of research of the Revised Blooms Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge. From the book, here is a great answer to the question what is the difference between the two: “Bloom's taxonomy categorizes the kind of knowledge and type of thinking that students demonstrate to answer a question. Webb's Depth-of-Knowledge model designates the depth of knowledge that students express in a given context to answer a question. By aligning these two frameworks, cognitive rigor acts as a high-quality instructional tool to ensure teachers prepare their students for success in and out of the classroom.”