Educational Leadership - September 2015

likely to give—not because they’re mind readers, but because they have thought deeply enough about the lesson to envisage what those questions and answers will be (Di Teodoro, Donders, Kemp-Davidson, Robertson, & Schuyler, 2011). Savvy teachers prepare ahead of time questions that will do three things: elicit prior knowledge, uncover student misconceptions, and move students toward their conceptual goal.

Notice I didn’t say you should give the answers—only that you should predict what the answers will be. It can be incredibly tempting to move this process along by giving students the answers when you see them struggling. But it’s a mistake to do so in an attempt to spare them discomfort or because you don’t think you have enough time.

Write down your most important questions and carry the list around with you as you check in with student groups. This way, you’ll be sure to ask each important question to each group. Occasionally, these well-crafted questions still won’t be enough to elicit the understanding you are targeting. It’s important to dig deeply for understanding because we as teachers are so familiar with the content that we may lose track of how difficult it is for students to grasp the content. This phenomenon, called the expert blind spot (Fisher & Frey, 2010), can be avoided with savvy prediction about where students might get stuck.

When a learner does get stuck, it’s essential to have a follow-up question or cue that will scaffold that student’s conceptual awareness and point toward the targeted content. Consider this dialogue:

TEACHER: What’s a nocturnal animal?

STUDENT: An animal that stays awake all night.

TEACHER: Tell me more about that. Does a nocturnal animal have special characteristics?

STUDENT: Well, it doesn’t sleep a lot. [misconception] TEACHER: I’m thinking of those pictures we saw of the great horned owl and the slow loris in the daytime and at night. Does your answer still work? (Fisher & Frey, 2010, p. 15).

This teacher wanted to uncover a student’s misconception that nocturnal animals sleep very little. So she drew attention to photos the student had seen that showed such creatures sleeping in the daytime. Had the teacher stopped at her first question, she never would’ve uncovered the underlying misconception. And had she not had her follow-up prompt prepared, she would’ve missed a perfect opportunity to push the student to examine his or her own thinking rather than having that thinking corrected by the teacher.

It’s powerful to reframe questions to use the word you. Imagine that after a student sees a discrepant event (such as a just-launched marble falling straight back down), you ask, “Why did that happen?” On the surface this seems like a legitimate question.

However, it sets a student up for trying
to explain the right answer and will
likely reveal little about the mental
models that learner holds. Instead, ask
“Why do you think that happened?”
or “What do you think will happen?”
These questions encourage reflection
and require the student to make his or
her covert thinking visible—even if it
isn’t right.

Your probing could stop here. But remember, you’re asking these questions because you’ve predicted that students harbor misconceptions that might warp the lens through which they view the content. It’s good to ask a further question—like “Why do you think that?”—that enables you to uncover the underpinnings of students’ thinking.

The reason to keep probing is like the reason to have a house professionally inspected before buying it. The house might look fine on the outside, but on closer inspection you discover the foundation is riddled with termites. The earlier you know, the sooner you can do something about it.

Using the Cycle in Layers

The predict–explain–observe–revise cycle can be used in layers. For instance, in the first part of my dark-matter lesson, I used the cycle with a concept that was familiar to the students. After this cycle was completed and students’ misconceptions had been addressed, we began a second cycle with content that wasn’t familiar. This second cycle took advantage of the conceptual work done in the first cycle to “feed forward” students’ learning.

In this second cycle, I asked students to predict the orbital velocities of stars beyond our solar system, stars located farther and farther away from the galactic center. Every student predicted that these stars’ velocities would slow down with increasing distance