Hello colleagues, I've long believed that having students craft their own questions for discussion is a powerful instructional technique. In recent years, we've been encouraged to focus on text-dependent questions. How can we support students to write discussion questions that allow learners to dig deep into the content they are working with?
Check out this 2-minute Teaching Channel video showing how high school ELA teacher Sarah Wessling supports students in writing text-dependent questions. The question stems Wessling provides seem especially important when learners are initially learning to write engaging questions that require critical thinking.
I'm looking forward to members' reactions to this technique.This example is from an ELA class. Do you think the strategy could be adapted to other content areas? Have you had students write their own questions for discussion? How has that worked for you?
Cheers, Susan Finn Miller
Moderator, Teaching & Learning CoP
Comments
Susan, you bring up a wonderful tip on reversing the role of teacher and student. We learn best what we teach, and students in the short clip you shared were actually learning to generate questions that are often given to them by teachers.
This technique reminds me a lot of a practice that I used with my ESL and native-speaking writing students who struggled with solving math problems. In my language classes, I would have them create word problems for others to solve. In solving, students also had to write the process for solving the problems.
I wonder what others here might add to how students can teach aspects of language the might be difficult to grasp, such as the example you provided. Thanks! Leecy