Follow-Up Questions
Change Package: Follow-Up Questions
Impact on Teaching
Large scale studies of high schools and middle schools have found that students typically have less than two minutes to have meaningful conversations about their content-based ideas per 60 minutes of instruction. However, we know that content-based discourse that allows students to discuss their ideas with each other leads to higher achievement in content area classes and on standardized tests. Utilizing follow-up questions that invite students to explain their thinking, support their ideas with evidence, and helps students to make connections across ideas, creates classrooms where students are expected to lead the learning and be the meaning makers.
Impact on Students
Students in classrooms that utilize student-centered instruction that invites students to voice their understandings and refine them through rich conversations with others, build knowledge and learn strategies that lead to higher levels of success with instructional tasks and on standardized tests.
How To
Planning
After you've created a high-level task that includes student-centered routines, it's important that you do the work of planning out the discussion that comes during the pair work and the whole group converation. The process of planning out the discussion or anticipating how students could respond to the task question, allows you to come to the conversation with a tool kit full of moves that will keep students at the center as the meaning makers.
The process of planning out a content-based discussion that allows students to talk with each other to grow their knowledge and be the meaning makers in the classroom should look similar to the below steps:
Complete the task to identify the ideal response
Anticipate a range of student responses to the same task
Sort student responses into like groupings & describe those groupings
Identify some follow-up responses that you can make to help students expand their thinking, think together, and learn from each other.
When we say follow-up responses, we mean those questions you’d ask on the fly when you drop in on small group conversation and you note the need to push student thinking or during a whole group discussion when you need to redirect an off target response.
Practical Measures
Coming Soon