How to Start Building Higher Order Thinking and Effective Questioning in the Classroom

hi this is jessica washington and wanted to stop here for moment and talk to you because just in the true million minds fashion i'm going to use this piece as pd break for you and put that in my segment but wanted to talk today little bit about questioning strategies and really building questioning in teacher's classroom now it's not one day training it's not even two it takes full week to couple of weeks of developing strong questioning strategies in the classroom however it's one of the most essential tools needed for our students we have to really build higher order thinking comprehension skills and also building that tick like to call where students are just catching information and able to digest it for themselves and then able to bring it back to you in different forms so how do we get kids just to start with the basis of questioning well thankfully to one of my clients and dear friend we stumbled on an old technique that used and it's really not about students first it's about teachers what mean about that is if were to ask you right now just give me question you're probably gonna say okay what is such and such or how do you do such and such and say that because the what the how are our key bases of understanding those are bloom's taxonomy level one that's because we naturally go to what we know we naturally go to what we talk about and we tend to have conversations on that very very basic remember level not an analyze so if i'm teaching in the classroom and just doing things on the fly if i'm coming up with question i'm coming up with something on lower blooms taxonomy lesson even though want to go higher so the question is how do or how do you as teacher know when to grab those essential questions how to grab those central questions and be able to do it without fumbling without forgetting without wrestling trying to find your lesson plan and figure out where it is very simple post it see if you simply post it on the wall when i'm talking and engaging and i'm teaching my kids and say you know what can ask you question what were the main conflicts in the story see that simple glance gave me higher order thinking question without me having to go off into different details or figuring out or trying to find it so if you can take the question stems of the questions that you really want to use from your create your evaluate your analyzation portions of bloom's taxonomy and just post them up in different places what will happen is naturally in your regular conversation with teaching students you're able to easily grab those questions and put it into the conversation guess what else is going to happen your students are going to see those same questions so now when you're doing think pair share you can turn around and grab question or have them look can you look at the green question number three because have my questions labeled up here so green number two is this one have green number three in here but will say hey table three talk about question green two and they're able to build their own stem and bring that own conversation into what they are doing so that's just quick way for you to talk about questioning into the classroom i'm going to give you one other small tidbit that small tidbit is how do bring this in professional development how do make my teachers own this topic have an idea for you so in the next pd opportunity you have the next time that you're coaching get your group of teachers maybe four teachers and print out ten of the question steps and you tell that teachers together hey these are ten question stems how about you guys tell me the top five or the best five so then let your teachers sit there and go through and discuss each other the best five from that conversation you're gonna say you know what let's just focus on two question stems for this week what are the two question stems that we are going to utilize as campus what are the two that we're going to turn around and discuss let the teachers decide why are we doing that one now your teachers are actually authentically working with questions determining how it can be used in the classroom and they're getting ownership of that conversation two they're also determining different ways to use it in the classroom and in this pd who did majority of the talking the teachers not you so it goes from you telling people what to do until people actually discovering and finding ways to utilize it and make ownership so now the team gets to decide the two questions that they're going for and you can turn around and have separate groups if you want to have group here group here and group here and they can debate battle out what are going to be our question stems for the school but go two and then in the next week get two more and then the next week two more but what happens is now that the teachers are building their ownership for the questions they're putting it up and they're utilizing it because they actually had time with the information and it wasn't something that just wasn't given to them as directive it's something that they actually have ownership and can hold that's just little bit about how to start questioning in the classroom how to start building that how to at least create foundation where we're using higher order thinking questions or more rigorous questions in more natural and daily capacity hope this helped little bit like said my name is jessica washington and i'm here with another pd breaks for you just part of another sorry part of the other our company million minds educational conglomerate i'll see you next time