C4: Asking the Right Questions

Fired Up About Inquiry

Now that we’re fired up about teaching inquiry, it should come along easily, right?  Yes and no.  The main part is that you are being open-minded to inquiry.  Yay!  This is the first major hurdle, because you are embracing inquiry as your WHY. 

You’ve considered how to incorporate engaging, challenging, relevant, and significant into your learning and teaching and you’ve tweaked your lesson plans for your unit. Is this enough?  No.

One of the greatest things people misunderstand about inquiry is they think it’s hands-on or project-based learning.  Just because a student plays with materials, does not guarantee they understand the objective and can apply it to a new situation. 

Just like grown ups, students need to be taught specific skills in order to master inquiry.  One of the foundational skills of inquiry is asking good questions.  Good questions lay the foundation for the inquiry process and must be explicitly taught.  

So where do we start? 

When I was teaching in Dubai in 2014, I had a PYP Coordinator who handed us a question stem grid.  We had no reference to where it came from, but it piqued our interest.  My teammate Nathan Sadler, (hey Nathan...congrats on your new principalship.  You’re gonna be brilliant!) decided to take this question grid and color code it.  After some time, I realized that the way he color-coded matched perfectly well with different types of questions posed by Dr H. Lynn Erickson in her work on concept-based curriculum and instruction.  

Recently, I found the original source to the question stem grid in Kath Murdoch’s book called The Power of Inquiry.  The grid is called the Weiderhold’s (1991) Question Matrix. 
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The main difference between the grid/matrix that I use, it doesn't have such finite labels to limit the thinking just color coding. This makes it much easier for students and teachers to use.  Let’s go over the colors now.

The types of questions we ask can trigger inquiry or not.  What questions are you not asking, because of fear or insecurity?  These are the questions you need to ask the most. 

Our students are exposed to countless bits of information each day.  Our role is helping them to decipher the meaning of the information and use it in new situations.  This cannot happen to the highest level if we don’t ask a variety of questions. 

Now, let’s apply this to your current unit of study, in the PYP we call this a unit of inquiry.  Go to our website and download the free question grid (thinkchat2020.weebly.com).  From the lens of your unit ideas and standards, try to fill out the question grid.  In the beginning, you might think this is too much.  I get it.  I felt the same in the beginning.  For me, it was the process of getting comfortable using the grid.  Once I found some familiarity, I stopped pre-populating questions for the unit and used the question grid as a guide.  When I created questions during a mini-lesson, I would ask students to help me, so they could replicate the process independently.    

If you are a more visual person we will be having a 5 DAY INQUIRY CHALLENGE to walk through our guides. Join our Facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1177890089215736/

See you in our next episode
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Remember, hold on to that passion