Part 1 - Develop Questions

What’s unique about this step is the opportunity for students to be involved in the thought process and decision-making about what the class should be figuring out and how the class should be figuring it out. It is important for each student to participate in generating a question to be explored and for those questions to be made public so that the class as a whole retains ownership of those questions. This may take on various forms such as a “Driving Question Board” or a “Notice and Wonder” chart.

Eliciting Questions Discussion

• What questions do we need to answer to solve the design challenge just presented?

• If we want to explain this phenomenon, what questions will we need to be able to answer?

• What questions do we now have after being introduced to this phenomenon?

• What questions do we need to ask the client/partner to refine our understanding of the problem they are trying to solve?

• What questions should we try and answer with this investigation? How will answering those questions help us figure something out about the phenomenon?

• What questions should we try and answer with this test of our design solution? How will answering those questions help us figure out something we need to know to solve the design challenge?

Discussion For Prioritizing Questions

• Which of our questions are similar? What makes them similar?

• Which questions should we answer first? Why do those questions come first?

• We can’t answer all of these questions at once, so which ones should we prioritize? Why are those questions important to answer, that is, ones that might help us make progress on a larger set of related questions?

Part 2 - Next Steps: Identifying actionable ways to figure out answers

• Similarly, students should be involved in thinking about ways to go about answering one or more of the questions from the class. This early on in the unit, it is not important that the ideas for investigations have a step-by-step procedure; they don’t have to be what is considered an “experiment.” Rather, the point is that students are identifying actionable ways to figure out answers to their questions. For example, maybe the class thinks a good way to follow up on one of their questions is to look up what experts have to say or gather secondhand data. Also, the goal isn’t to come up with the perfect question or solution, anything goes! The questions and next steps that are kept on a public class record should be kept alive! Questions and next steps should be revised, revisited, and checked off as the unit progresses.

• Students should try to come up with an explanation, model or some other reasoning to explain why or how the phenomenon under investigation is happening. Oftentimes, people view this attempt to make sense of the phenomenon as pointless. For example, they may think that we know the students don’t understand what’s going on, so why take the time for them to try and come up with a reason to explain the phenomenon when it’s going to be wrong? The intention of this section is not to come up with the “right” answer.

Initial Ideas Discussion

1. Provide a way for all students to surface their ideas (think-pair-share is one strategy). 

   • What’s your “first draft” thinking? 

   • What experiences do you have that might help you with this phenomenon?

2. Give students a chance to clarify one another’s ideas and to ask about why people think their ideas are good ones

   • Can you say more about that?

   • Where does that idea come from?

   • Is that something you’ve heard, observed, or experienced before?

   • What do you mean when you say the word “______”?

   • Can anyone add onto this idea?

   • Who has a different way of thinking about this topic?

   • Can you think of an instance when this was not the case?

3. Ask a student to summarize the initial ideas that the class has

   • Who can summarize some of the ideas we’ve heard today?

   • Is this a complete summary? Can someone add what’s missing?

   • Does the summary capture our ideas accurately?

4. Ask students how they might test or further explore their ideas

   • What are some ways we could test our initial thinking?

   • What ideas are we unsure about, that we need to know more before we can be confident in them?