Open and Closed Questioning

 Some thoughts and suggestions for changing CLOSED questions into OPEN ones!!

Questions to Promote Quality Thinking

 In mathematics we are too quick to use CLOSED Questions What is 23 + 47? These types of questions are just asking, in many cases to recall a fact or a skill, Little, if no thinking required!!  

So we need to "Open" up the questions(more about these in a future post)

We need to have a bank of good questions that will help us, as teachers,  so that we can encourage the Students, to reflect, Justify, and think about what they have been doing.

Here are a couple of lists that you may wish to use as you explore more Open Type Questions

Questions to promote Students Thinking

 Recently on a FaceBook Post a teacher was asking for activities to send home during New Zealand's Covid-Delta lockdown(August 2021)

I replied to the post suggesting that if we supplied parents with a list of questions to use when they were interacting with their kids, that may be better than a lot of busy work!!   This response got a number of likes and 💗's

This suggested to me that our institutions may not be communicating the best and easiest ways of helping their kids while in lockdown., so I resurrected a handout I created may moons ago!

I believe most of these questions can be used with all types of activities that kids get into, whether it be Lego Building, or playing on the swing, or looking for bugs in the garden

Hope they help.

We call it Streaming!! North Americans call it Tracking

 Jo Boaler and team "YouCubians" latest news letter has links to research about the benfits of removing Streaming in schools.

I encourage all teachers to take time to read the research.

I was encouraged to see the emphasis on Inservice support for teachers, something I believe here in NZ we have diminished over the years

Dear youcubians,
 
I hope you are having, or have had, a good summer break. With a new school year starting, I'd like to highlight an important question for education: how we group students so that they can have the opportunity to go forward in mathematics and take any classes they want. Traditional systems of tracking have not served our students well and have resulted in significant inequities in the school system. The new proposed California Framework, for which I am one of the authors, sets out different approaches that have been shown to be more successful.
 
To help educators with this complex issue we have –

1. Released an updated new paper that I co-authored with David Foster, which shares the evidence from multiple school districts engaged in de-tracking of middle school classrooms. Study 2, the new addition to the paper, shares significant student achievement increases, from across the achievement range, after a de-tracking initiative involving over 16,000 students. The paper also discusses the reasons for parent opposition and strategies to educate those who oppose such changes.
2. Designed new professional development to support teachers who are teaching mathematics to groups of students that are heterogenous, or “mixed ability,” a description that fits all classrooms!  We have planned an intensive one-day workshop to help teachers learn the different research-based options available to them, and the ways they work in classrooms.  We will also consider examples from teachers who work with heterogenous groups in schools without mathematics “tracks."  We are offering this workshop with two different formats and dates:

• On October 18 we will host the workshop in-person at Stanford
• On October 25 we will conduct a live, online version of the workshop

We hope these scheduling options, created at the request of many teachers who cannot travel to California, give you the flexibility to consider joining us this fall!  The cost for each session is the same— $595 per person— and you can register online by clicking on the dates above.  If you have questions, would like to enroll a group of more than 6, or cannot register right away and would like us to hold space for you, please email us at pdinfo@youcubed.org.

In our next newsletter we will be sharing the new Week of Inspirational Maths (WIM)! For those of you who are already back at school or planning lessons, the WIM lessons and mindset videos are always available for you to choose and use and can be accessed here.
 
As always, keep in touch, on social media, we always love to hear from you.
 
Viva La Maths Revolution!
Jo

Examples of Repeatable, Thinking Maths Activities

 These activities need to be considered in relation to my previous BLOG;  

"What To Do With The Others?

Note that each activity has the equipment needed as well as a playing board (if required) on the one side of the page. 

To make teacher easier for you, you need to collect, develop many of these types of Maintenance, Repeatable activities and have them organise in a way that suits you and the class.

What To Do With The Others?

Many of us have been encouraged to have groups within our Maths Classes, in fact it has been a basic organisation since the 60’s when I started teaching.  These groups were originally based on ability(much research says this is not the best way of grouping) now we can have all sorts of groups, 

•         Interest
•         Social
•         Groups of 2 or 4 etc
•         Small groups for interacting with the teacher, rather than a large class 
•         Groups of one
  

 

How ever we organise the issue is about the groups that are not under "Direct Supervision" so we here the catch cry

             “What Do I Do With The Others?”

For successful 2 or 3 group organisations to work then the most important thing is that the groups/children, not with the teacher, know what to do!!  

One organisation that has been used for a number of years is Groups of Four.  The class has a common open ended activity and groups of four work together to solve/attempt the activity.  After a period of time the groups report back their findings to the whole class. Sometimes roles are assigned to each child (with the roles changed for each new task)

• Reporter
• Recorder
• Gopher
  

For any groups/small group teaching we have to make sure that the students, not with the teacher, are generally on task and know what to do!!

This means:

• They can work Independently or in pairs, small groups, without supervision
• They know the organisation of the classroom:
• They know how to work quietly,
• They know what to do when they have completed the task,
• They knowwhere to get another activity,equipment and tidy up
  
• They know where to place completed work,
• They can Self Mark, as appropriate without cheating
  

They also need to Know the Mathematics, and I believe this is where most of us fall down: 

We teach something today/yesterday and then go and ask them to practise it.  

        In many cases students need teacher supervision to become masters of the skill/process. 

In the immediate aftermath of teaching a process/skill: 

        they may not know what to do or how to complete the worksheet etc.  

 

Please take time teaching repeatable Thinking type activities so that all students know what to do,

• Have repeatable activities printed on card and laminated, if possible, so students can write on them with Dry Erase and then wipe clean
• Have the activities organised by group, or content.  possible coded for topic/strand
• Some teachers have these in Plastic Bags-but if a die is missing someone has to check- so I advise that no equipment is with the activity but in a place where students can go and get the dice or pen or paper clips(organisation) 
• The equipment needed for an activity should be listed on the Card(see my examples)

I have advised all teachers to take time teaching and practising Independent activities and routines as a class, before trying to introduce groups.  The children’s knowledge of these routines and behaviours make your maths' teaching so much easier.

This time, organising students to work independently,  could be anything up to 3-4 weeks (a whole term) depending on the group of students.  We cant rush these things if we wish to enjoy the teaching as well as the kids learning the maths.  Remember KISS.

When ready have two groups and get those working before starting with 3 groups(and no more)

Without the appropriate activities, and behaviours by the children, we do make our work hard for ourselves.

Marking

Traditionally the teacher has used the Red and Green pens to say which one is correct or which is not.

• I prefer teachers and myself not to stand in judgement,( be the Policeman) but to ask the Groups/individuals to report back with reasons and explanations as to why they think they have ended up with the result. Other groups/children may wish to dispute the result so we should be asking the children and groups to JUSTIFY their answers.
• I can remember a situation in a classroom where a child gave an answer, say 4, and was told that it was wrong.  This upset the child so I went and said, “can you explain what you did?” During the explanation the answer was 4-for what the child did

Questions

In my time working with Teachers and Students, I often did not know the “answer/s” to particular questions, problems that I presented  This meant I could not “lead” the kids to what I thought was the answer, I used questions such as:

•     Did you try this?
•     Can you explain how you got that answer?
•     Can you show me what you did?
•     Would you like to teach /explain this to a group?
•      What does the problem tell you?
•      What do you have to find?
•      What Strategy approach will you/did you use?

 I like this approach that one school uses for getting students to explain how they tackled a problem.