Here’s a simple rule to help me ensure that I’ve left enough room to differentiate: never ask students a one-off question. Any question that I prepare should be part of a sequence of questions. Each question should have a follow-up. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Note the difference in these sets of questions.
| Set A | Set B |
|---|---|
|
|
Do you see the difference?
One-Offs vs Sequences of Questions
Set A jumps randomly from topic to topic, always staying at the lowest levels of Blooms. Then, at the end, it jumps to a pure opinion question (beware pure opinion questions!).
Set B sticks with one topic and goes deeper and deeper. It is scaffolded since each question leads naturally to the next question. By the time they get to question five (and, no, not everyone needs to get to question five), students are primed to give an interesting, thought-out answer.
Now, if I had started with question five (“Switch Brian with another character from a different story. Which character would handle the new situation better?”), I’d get worse answers. Students are not ready for that level of thinking right away. The low-level questions set the stage for higher-level thinking. They provide that all-important scaffolding.
Most importantly, there is room for my 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
Once you start looking, you’ll see versions of Set A everywhere! Low-level questions randomly jumping from topic to topic. 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-up questions in our normal conversations. So let’s also do it when we ask our students questions.
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 rewrite that sentence (yikes). Then I’ll ask some follow-up questions.
- 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 this word’s meaning 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: Oh, I’m going to avoid writing “explain your thinking” or “explain why” because my students know that explaining is simply the expectation.
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