Educational Leadership - September 2015

their reading with fellow students and helped create a learning agenda for the whole class.

To Accelerate Knowledge Acquisition

In a geometry lesson he was teaching in a 5th grade class in Frederick County, Maryland, Jay Corrigan used student questions to explore quadri laterals. 2 At the beginning of the geometry unit, he wanted students to think about what they already knew about shapes, but he also included novel information (the term trapezium) in the Question Focus ( Trapezium Trapezoid Parallelogram) to pique students’ curiosity and ensure every student that they would have something new to learn. This Question Focus helped provoke students’ ques tions and drive inquiry as the students learned about quadrilaterals, geometric patterns, and relationships among geometric concepts. The use of arrows within the Question Focus offered a hint of the direction of the unit and could elicit more questions. Corrigan expected that by hearing a range of student questions and making their thinking visible, he would gain more insight into their understanding of quadrilaterals.

Student questions did indeed go in various directions, but they all related to gaining a deeper understanding of the content Corrigan needed to teach. Students asked such questions as, Is a trapezium a 3-D figure? Do parallelograms and trapezoids have the same amount of sides? What do the arrows in the Question Focus mean?

The questions began to lock in on
the words themselves ( Why do tra
pezium and trapezoid have the same
first six letters?). As the students con
tinued, Corrigan understood from
their questions that some were ready
to push ahead (What do all three have
in common?) and that one student
wanted basic information about the
newly introduced term ( What is a
trapezium?).
When Corrigan reviewed the stu
dents’ questions, he noticed that there
were more questions about shapes
than about the relationships between
them. Because he knew that it was
important for students to learn about
the relationships, he emphasized that
in ensuing lessons. He also honored
students’ questions by using several of
them to open the next few lessons.
Corrigan also observed a district
colleague using the process to kick
off a unit. Jennifer Shaffer presented
her kindergarten class with a visually
engaging Question Focus: A photo
graph of an adult alligator with two
baby alligators riding on its head in a
body of water surrounded by different
kinds of vegetation.
The picture captivated the students,
and they began to analyze it closely,
as good scientists and investigators
should, by asking, Is the alligator
camouflaged Why do the babies have
stripes? Is it a mom or dad alligator?
Additional questions about the color
of the alligators’ eyes—the babies’
eyes were white and the adult’s were
black—and about the bumps on the
back of the adult alligator sparked
their curiosity.
The class then read a nonfiction text
on alligators, and their questions were
used to guide their thinking during
the reading. They were excited to find
answers to their questions in the book.
The teacher and students pared down
their questions to those that were open
and therefore appropriate for a writing
task. These kindergarten students then
prioritized the questions, chose the
ones they found most interesting, and
wrote answers to them.
In each of these classrooms, stu
dents’ questions helped the teachers
understand both student interests and
the content they needed to emphasize.
Corrigan, for example, noted that “ety
mology is not something I would even
have considered teaching students, but
students wanted to know more about
the terms themselves.” So he helped
them learn about the etymology of
words like poly (many), gon (sides),
hedron (faces), and rectangle (right
angles).

To Formatively Assess Students Megan Gretzinger, a high school math teacher from Appleton City, Missouri, used students’ questions as a formative assessment (Gretzinger, personal com munication, March 13, 2015). She chose just one word as her Question Focus, the topic she was covering— “Volume.” Gretzinger was eager to hear students’ questions to see how well they had understood the lesson on volume that she had just finished and what questions were percolating in their minds.