Dr. Victoria Jacobs, Examining the Meaning and Purpose of our Questions ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 12 Mike (00:03): The questions educators ask their students matter. They can have a profound impact on students' thinking and the shape of their mathematical identities. Today we're examining different types of questions, their purpose and the meaning students make of them. Joining us for this conversation is Dr. Vicki Jacobs from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Welcome to the podcast, Vicki. I'm really excited to talk with you today. Vicki (00:33): Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Mike (00:36): So you've been examining the ways that educators use questioning to explore the details of students' thinking. And I wonder if we could start by having you share what drew you to the topic. Vicki (00:47): For me, it all starts with children's thinking because it's absolutely fascinating, but it's also mathematically rich. And so a core part of good math instruction is when teachers elicit children's ideas and then build instruction based on that. And so questioning obviously plays a big role in that, but it's hard. It's hard to do that well in the moment. So I found questioning to explore children's thinking to be a worthwhile thing to spend time thinking about and working on. Mike (01:17): Well, let's dig into the ideas that have emerged from that work. How can teachers think about the types of questions that they might ask their students? Vicki (01:24): Happy to share. But before I talk about what I've learned about questioning, I really need to acknowledge some of the many people that have helped me learn about questioning over the years. And I want to give a particular shout out to the teachers and researchers in the wonderful cognitively guided instruction or CGI community as well as my long-term research collaborators at San Diego State University. And more recently, Susan Sen. This work isn't done alone, but what have we learned about teacher questioning across a variety of projects? I'll share two big ideas and the first relates to the goals of questioning and the second addresses more directly the types of questions teachers might ask. So let's start with the goals of questioning because there are lots of reasons teachers might ask questions in math classrooms. And one common way to think about the goal of questioning is that we need to direct children to particular strategies during problem solving. (02:23): So if children are stuck or they're headed down a wrong path, we can use questions to redirect them so that they can get to correct answers with particular strategies. Sometimes that may be okay, but when we only do that, we're missing a big opportunity to tap into children's sense-making. Another way to think about the goal of questioning is that we're trying to explore children's thinking during problem solving. So think about a math task where multiple strategies are encouraged and children can approach problem solving in any way that makes sense to. So we can then ask questions that are designed to reveal how children are thinking about the problem solving, not just how well they're executing our strategies. And we can ask these questions when children are stuck, but also when they solve problems correctly. So this shift in the purpose of questioning is huge. And I want to share a quote from a teacher that I think captures the enormity of this shift. (03:26): She's a fifth grade teacher, and what she said was the biggest thing I learned from the professional development was not asking questions to get them to the answers so that I could move them up a strategy, but to understand their thinking. That literally changed my world. It changed everything. So I love this quote because it shows how transformative this shift can be because when teachers become curious about how children are thinking about problem solving, they give children more space to problem solve in multiple ways, and then they can question to understand and support children's ideas. And these types of questions are great because they increase learning opportunities for both children and teachers. So children get more opportunities to learn how to talk math in a way that's meaningful to them because they're talking about their own ideas and they also get to clarify what they did think more about important math that's embedded in their strategies and sometimes to even self-correct. And then as teachers, these types of questions give us a window into children's understandings, and that helps us determine our next steps. Questioning can have a different and powerful purpose when we shift from directing children toward particular strategies to exploring their mathematical thinking. Mike (04:54): I keep going back to the quote that you shared, and I think the details of the why and kind of the difference in the experience for students really jump out. But I'm really compelled by what that teacher ...
