Never ask your students a one-off question. Any question that you prepare should have a natural follow-up question. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Note the difference in these sets of questions.
Set A
- What is the main character’s trait in Hatchet?
- What is the setting in Hatchet?
- What is the story’s main problem?
- What is this story’s moral?
- Did you like this story?
Set B
- What is the main character’s trait in Hatchet?
- What are the benefits of that trait?
- How does that trait lead to problems?
- What character from another story, movie, or game has a trait with similar benefits and problems?
- If you switched those characters, which one would better handle the new situation?
Do take a good look before moving along!
One-Offs versus Sequences of Questions
Do you see the difference?
Set One jumps from topic to topic, staying at low levels of Blooms until the final question, which is pure opinion (and beware pure opinion questions! 👻).
Set Two sticks with one topic (Brian’s character trait) and goes deeper and deeper. It is scaffolded. Each question leads naturally to the next question. By the time they get to five (and, no, not everyone even needs to get there), students are primed to give an interesting, thought-out answer. Had I started with question five (“Switch Brian with another character from a different story. Which character would handle the new situation better?”), I’m going to get worse questions. The low-level questions set the stage for higher-level thinking.
Most importantly, there is room for my brightest, most advanced student to think! With Set One, the most brilliant child is stuck in first gear. They’ll give very similar answers to every other student since each question has such a low ceiling.
Beware Multiple, Unrelated Questions
You’ll start noticing this everywhere! I’ve grabbed a few examples:
Can you imagine catching up with your friend after summer break and asking questions in this way?
What was one thing you ate this summer? What was the best movie you saw? What is a place you visited? Who did you see this summer? What do you want to do next summer?
I mean… that’s not how humans talk! And it’s very obvious how to fix it, right? Ask about the thing they ate. Then ask another question about the thing they ate. You’d probably talk about the thing they ate for a long time before switching to the movie they saw. We naturally ask follow-ups.
Pick ONE Question. Build a Sequence.
So, in each case, we’d do better to take a single question from the set, build it into a sequence of follow-ups that climb Bloom’s, and just ditch the rest!
I did a whole video about the dice and vocab set, so I’ll tackle the math example here. Let’s start with 2) “Tell a math word you learned and what it means.”
First, I’d re-write that sentence (yikes). Then I’ll ask follow-ups.
- Which new vocabulary word from this chapter was the most interesting to you?
- What other topics does that word remind you of?
- Is there a word that means the opposite of this word? If not, could you invent one?
- If you had to explain what this word means to a kindergartener, how would you do it?
Hopefully it’s obvious how much more powerful this sequence of questions is than the original list of one-offs!
PS: I’m not going to write “explain your thinking” or “explain why” because my students know that explaining is simply the expectation.
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