Holt Think: Ed, Creativity, Tech, Administration

When the Conversation Stops

Socrates might have been proud. We educators are great at asking questions. We love to ask our students something, anything. Probably, if you think about the last class period you taught, you could make the case that the entire class period was based on questioning. We question for a variety of reasons including increasing understanding of a concept, improving retention and encouraging participation in class. We are great questioners. Heck, if you think about it, we often start the entire school year with a question “What did you do this summer?” and end it with a question “What are you going to do this summer?”  Then, when we are finish asking questions in class, we assign more as homework. Take a guess on how many questions you ask in a day. 50? 75? 100? One study found that teachers ask between 300-400 questions each day (Leven and Long, 1981)! We love questions. We love Socrates!

Of course, there are many other benefits to questioning: keeping students actively involved, allowing students the opportunity to express their ideas, enabling students to hear different explanations, allows us to help pace lessons and of course. After we ask questions, we can adjust our lessons to meet classroom needs. Ask away!

I suppose if we were to actually make a graph of our questions, most of them would fall under the lowest level of Bloom’s: “What is photosynthesis?” or “What is 9x9?” “Name 10 prepositions.”   These are the easiest to check for correctness, so they are of course the easiest  and most often asked. The more probing questions that might have messy answers are not asked as often; the “Was Truman right to drop the nuclear bomb on Japan?” and “Why would we want to even know about photosynthesis?”-type questions. We love to question so much that probably any teacher that has been in education for any amount of time has taken some sort of professional development session on questioning. Entire books have been written on how to question our students. We love the questions! 

Questions rock!

Except…

We don’t seem to love questions so much when the technique is turned around and WE are asked to answer questions. How many of us have lowered our heads pretending we are not sitting in the audience, or started counting ceiling tiles, or secretly said “Please don’t call on me, please don’t call on me…” whenever a principal or presenter starts to ask US questions? If I don’t make eye contact with the speaker, he can’t see me and he won’t call on me. Suddenly, those same reasons that we actively use on a daily basis  as a matter of course are considered unfriendly and intrusive. I have even been in sessions where people sitting next to me would say “I swear, if he calls on me I am walking out the door!”  Of course, there is always ONE person that loves to answer questions in the group. That one person that ruins it for the rest of us…We even might gently chide that person as a “teacher’s pet.” “That Jerry, always answering the questions.” What a suck up!

We love questions. We really do.

Just please don’t ask us any. For the love of all that is holy, don’t ask us. Suddenly, we become students when the questions are asked of us. We don’t want to appear to be uninformed. We don’t want to look bad in front of our peers. Please, when is this session over? In some situations, presenters and audience even have an unwritten agreement: “Don’t ask any questions, and we will let you off easy. Heck, we might even buy whatever it is your selling in the lobby. Put us on the spot however, and all bets are off.”

But questions do have their place even when we are the ones being questioned. Those exact same reasons that we use when we are asking our students questions work in professional development settings as well. How well do we understand a concept? Do we have an opinion about this topic? How can we learn more about this?  I have noticed this phenomenon a lot in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) that I have been a part of. In many situations, the conversation dries up, especially if the PLC meets on a regular basis and the person in charge (even though everyone is supposed to be in charge) has run out of ideas to talk about. Many PLCs across the country are nothing more than meetings where teachers look at student data. What do you do once all of the data has been analyzed? 

How do you get the conversation going again? How do you engage your PLC (or staff, or curricular department)  while at the same time not appearing to be confrontational? I think the best method is one where a question is presented that does not have a right or wrong answer. A “messy question” if you will. Messy questions provide a non-threatening conversation starter that anyone can contribute to. There are no right or wrong answers, just answers. The answers are the basis for the conversation, not the question. In my book “180 Questions” I try to present exactly these types of questions: “How do we reach out to parents that have never been to our campus?” “Are we using technology to it’s full potential? If not, why not?” and so on. The point of the question is not to be used as a “gotcha” kind of thing, but rather an ice breaker to get the conversation about teaching and learning back into professional development. When was the last time we actually discussed the profession of education in a PLC? When did we do something to improve ourselves as educators, instead of just trying to improve a test score? Those are the types of things that happen when we actually start asking ourselves meaningful questions. When we ask the questions that colleagues and ourselves can really bite into, then, as educators, real learning can take place. Just like when we ask our students meaningful questions.

Socrates would be proud. 

“180 Questions: Daily Reflections For Educators and Their Professional Learning Communities” ©2012

Available in the iTunes bookstore exclusively for the iPad 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/180-questions/id573946590?mt=11

$6.99

When the Conversation Stops

Socrates might have been proud. We educators are great at asking questions. We love to ask our students something, anything. Probably, if you think about the last class period you taught, you could make the case that the entire class period was based on questioning. We question for a variety of reasons including increasing understanding of a concept, improving retention and encouraging participation in class. We are great questioners. Heck, if you think about it, we often start the entire school year with a question “What did you do this summer?” and end it with a question “What are you going to do this summer?”  Then, when we are finish asking questions in class, we assign more as homework. Take a guess on how many questions you ask in a day. 50? 75? 100? One study found that teachers ask between 300-400 questions each day (Leven and Long, 1981)! We love questions. We love Socrates!

Of course, there are many other benefits to questioning: keeping students actively involved, allowing students the opportunity to express their ideas, enabling students to hear different explanations, allows us to help pace lessons and of course. After we ask questions, we can adjust our lessons to meet classroom needs. Ask away!

I suppose if we were to actually make a graph of our questions, most of them would fall under the lowest level of Bloom’s: “What is photosynthesis?” or “What is 9x9?” “Name 10 prepositions.”   These are the easiest to check for correctness, so they are of course the easiest  and most often asked. The more probing questions that might have messy answers are not asked as often; the “Was Truman right to drop the nuclear bomb on Japan?” and “Why would we want to even know about photosynthesis?”-type questions. We love to question so much that probably any teacher that has been in education for any amount of time has taken some sort of professional development session on questioning. Entire books have been written on how to question our students. We love the questions! 

Questions rock!

Except…

We don’t seem to love questions so much when the technique is turned around and WE are asked to answer questions. How many of us have lowered our heads pretending we are not sitting in the audience, or started counting ceiling tiles, or secretly said “Please don’t call on me, please don’t call on me…” whenever a principal or presenter starts to ask US questions? If I don’t make eye contact with the speaker, he can’t see me and he won’t call on me. Suddenly, those same reasons that we actively use on a daily basis  as a matter of course are considered unfriendly and intrusive. I have even been in sessions where people sitting next to me would say “I swear, if he calls on me I am walking out the door!”  Of course, there is always ONE person that loves to answer questions in the group. That one person that ruins it for the rest of us…We even might gently chide that person as a “teacher’s pet.” “That Jerry, always answering the questions.” What a suck up!

We love questions. We really do.

Just please don’t ask us any. For the love of all that is holy, don’t ask us. Suddenly, we become students when the questions are asked of us. We don’t want to appear to be uninformed. We don’t want to look bad in front of our peers. Please, when is this session over? In some situations, presenters and audience even have an unwritten agreement: “Don’t ask any questions, and we will let you off easy. Heck, we might even buy whatever it is your selling in the lobby. Put us on the spot however, and all bets are off.”

But questions do have their place even when we are the ones being questioned. Those exact same reasons that we use when we are asking our students questions work in professional development settings as well. How well do we understand a concept? Do we have an opinion about this topic? How can we learn more about this?  I have noticed this phenomenon a lot in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) that I have been a part of. In many situations, the conversation dries up, especially if the PLC meets on a regular basis and the person in charge (even though everyone is supposed to be in charge) has run out of ideas to talk about. Many PLCs across the country are nothing more than meetings where teachers look at student data. What do you do once all of the data has been analyzed? 

How do you get the conversation going again? How do you engage your PLC (or staff, or curricular department)  while at the same time not appearing to be confrontational? I think the best method is one where a question is presented that does not have a right or wrong answer. A “messy question” if you will. Messy questions provide a non-threatening conversation starter that anyone can contribute to. There are no right or wrong answers, just answers. The answers are the basis for the conversation, not the question. In my book “180 Questions” I try to present exactly these types of questions: “How do we reach out to parents that have never been to our campus?” “Are we using technology to it’s full potential? If not, why not?” and so on. The point of the question is not to be used as a “gotcha” kind of thing, but rather an ice breaker to get the conversation about teaching and learning back into professional development. When was the last time we actually discussed the profession of education in a PLC? When did we do something to improve ourselves as educators, instead of just trying to improve a test score? Those are the types of things that happen when we actually start asking ourselves meaningful questions. When we ask the questions that colleagues and ourselves can really bite into, then, as educators, real learning can take place. Just like when we ask our students meaningful questions.

Socrates would be proud. 

“180 Questions: Daily Reflections For Educators and Their Professional Learning Communities” ©2012

Available in the iTunes bookstore exclusively for the iPad 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/180-questions/id573946590?mt=11

$6.99

This first appeared in Andrea Keller’s Blog Ideas From a Busy Bee

Project Share Texas Overview Video

Project Share: Project Share: A Gateway to 21st Century Learning

Irritating Questions Help us Grow.

If you think about the questions that most of us hear or ask during the day, they are fairly easy to answer: 

• How was your day?
• How is your family?
• What did you learn in school today?
• Was dinner alright?
• Is there anything else I can get you? 
• Did you find everything alright?

Most of those are so routine, so commonplace, that they often don’t even require too much thinking for an answer:

• Fine.
• Okay.
• Nothing.
• Yes.
• No.
• Yep.

In fact, I have started to believe that we collectively are beginning to lose the skill of questioning, not only in our personal lives, but also in our professional lives as well. Not because we don’t want to know, not because we have not been trained at how to question,  but because we are getting very good at accepting answers that have minimal thought in them. “Yep” and “No” might technically be the correct answer but it also is the lazy answer. In a time of rushed classes, too many standards to cover and tests we have to take, slowing down to think about answering to the answers is probably far from many educators minds. How often do we ask a question to someone, a colleague, a student, a parent, expecting them to give us the same answer that we have already formulate on our minds? How often do we get the answer we want and simply move on, not 

Recently I watched a class being taught and it occurred to me that every question that was being asked and answered required pretty low level recall type question. No one was being challenged, not the students nor the teacher. The teacher appeared, at least to me, to be asking the same questions that she had been asking for years, and the students were responding in the same manner that they have been doing for years. The teacher knows the answers, The students know how to answer, it was more of a routine that both groups had grown accustomed to. 

I then went to an administrators meeting where, during the “Any Questions” portion of the meeting, the only questions asked were clarification type ones..”Did you say…? “and “Can you repeat…?” Again, low level questions, low level answers, no true thinking required.

I wondered if students teachers and administrators sort of had the same kind of mindset when questioning? They don’t want to challenge too much, they don’t want to stand out, they don’t want to be seen as anything other than good students/teachers/administrators. If they ask questions that may make the receiver uncomfortable, do they fear retaliation, a bad grade, a poor evaluation? Have we 

That got me thinking about how when we as educators get together in our Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) do we treat that space the same as we treat our classroom space? Are the questions we ask already answered for us? Do the people know the answers to the questions we are going to ask? I think in many many cases, the answer is a simple “Yes.” 

I am starting to believe that the best kind of questions, especially in PLCs, are those that make people uncomfortable. Those that put a little sand in your shorts while playing in your sandbox. Irritation is not always a bad thing.

Does your PLC ever ask questions about teaching strategies?  Which ones work, which don’t? Do they ever call  someone out for using bad techniques? Does the school as a whole ever do any kind of retrospection, like ask if the students are happy? Does what we do here work? How do we know we are successful? What is it like to be a student at our school? If we could make one change a week for the 36 weeks of school, what would each one be? 

Those are the ideas behind my book “180 Questions: Daily Reflections for Educators and Thier PLCs.”  The questions are designed to be a bit irritating. But that irritation  is designed to stimulate conversation. Many PLCs have lost the ability to ask real questions about teaching and learning at their campuses. 

A sample of questions from the book might look like:

• When was the last time we took a risk while teaching?
• What makes you an expert at what you teach?
• We tell our students to be lifelong learners. Are we?
• How do we handle colleagues that have negative attitudes?
• At the end of the day, why are we here?

Those are just a small sample of the questions designed to get educators thinking about education, not just data points, not just standardized tests, and not just getting from point A to point B ina curriculum guide. We need to ask ourselves questions about how we teach, what we teach, even why we teach. 

If we are not being professionally irritated once in a while, then we we grow stagnant. Asking ourselves what we are doing as educators every once-in-a-while is a good way to keep growing personally professionally. 

180 Questions is available for iBooks in the iTunes Bookstore for $6.99.

Matching type of training to delivery method: LCISD

Chad Jones and Chris Nelson from Lamar CISD presented at TCEA 2013 on how different training modes that their district presented match with the training delivery methods. In essence, they matched the way they did staff development ( method) with the type of called for training. For instance, if they were creating documents as the training method then documents would be best for basic training purposes. I like the idea of matching the method of training with the topic of training. In the above graphic, you can see that LCISD says that they create documents for training ( for instance short one pagers on how to use the email system) for basic information and for simple how to’s. The team at LCISD has put together their training into a one stop portal called INTERACT Cafe, which is where all documents, all videos and all training materials are located. I think I will revisit the matrix above to see if it can be modified for my district’s needs, but in the meantime, this is a good place to start with the idea of matching your staff development to the training method. Good job Lamar. Lead on.