mixitupdifferentiation

Get Thinking

In order to get students thinking, four specific strategies emerge - using a variety of questioning strategies, scaffolding students from teacher directed to more student directed activities - http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/lit_ins4.html , student use of both deductive and inductive reasoning skills and using some of the strategies from Marzano, Pickering and Pollock's A Handbook for Classroom Instruction that Works. Here is a breakdown of each strategy and some resources to help along the way:

1. Questioning - what a significant area! Varying your questioning strategies is a major component of differentiation. All students should be exposed to different levels of thinking taxonomies in the questioning process. A reminder is also to have students heavily involved in the questioning process. As Nancy Johnson Farris, gifted coordinator, author and trainer in Illinois, has said, "There is more thinking and learning in asking questions than in answering them."

Below you will find some examples of questioning strategies and related web resources:

Use of Bloom's Taxonomy. Create a cube with the different levels of the taxonomy. When a student rolls the cube, whichever level is on top is the level of the question that has to be posed. For younger students it would be appropriate to put on the cube, "why" instead of the word analysis. Web resources for Bloom's Taxonomy include: http://www.officeport.com/edu/blooms.htm; http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic69.htm
Use of Question Answer Relationship to promote comprehension of text. Resources include:
http://www.kimskorner4teachertalk.com/readingliterature/readingstrategies/QAR.htm; http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=227; http://www.indiana.edu/~l517/QAR.htm
Use of Socratic Questioning: http://changingminds.org/techniques/questioning/socratic_questions.htm http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/socratic/second.html; http://ed.fnal.gov/trc_new/tutorial/taxonomy.html
Use of Essential Questions to begin a unit of study. Resources include: http://fno.org/nov97/toolkit.html
Use of the Dense Questioning Strategy: http://www.englishcompanion.com/pdfDocs/introdenseq.pdf

2. Building a variety of thinking/reasoning skills and strategies: deductive and inductive, analytic, classifying, synthesis, evaluative, comparative. Please find a link to a powerpoint presentation on Building Thinking/Reasoning Skills and Questioning Strategies, steps to explicitly teach for development of each reasoning skill and examples of websites to support reasoning skill development.

3. Teacher and student-directed activities. In the book, Classroom Instruction that works, Dr. Robert Marzano and his co-authors, Debra Pickering and Jane Pollock, discuss the idea of moving students from teacher-directed activities to more student-directed activities. Here is an example of this idea in terms of one of his strategies that works, identifying similarities and differences:

Teacher-directed compare and contrast activity - In Social Studies, students are studying presidents and first ladies. The teacher asks students to compare and contrast Jacqueline Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt in terms of their childhood, education and charity emphasis. All students are to use a table to record their results.
Student-directed compare and contrast activity - Students view the list of first ladies. They each select two first ladies of their interest, select three areas to compare and contrast and then select an appropriate graphic organizer to display the results.

Some students will need more assistance along the way, but the idea is to scaffold them all towards making decisions and using thinking strategies on their own. This scaffolding idea also correlates directly with the differentiation strategies of tiering and curriculum compacting (see "Beyond Comfort Zones" page).