Higher Level Questions - A Letter to Parents

Module 8 Reflection Letter to Parents

Students must take control of their thinking processes. They must engage with material in meaningful ways and not have their learning experience limited to call and response lessons. Regurgitating information is not terribly useful for the real world and does not spark natural curiosity. It also does not create authentic learning experiences.  The level of attention gained by students is limited by dynamics of the input method chosen by the teacher. No classroom will ever be completely full of students that will be completely engage in one specific modality, yet we tend to cater to students that function well in a typical direct instruction classroom. On the surface these students are performing well, and other are simply deficient in skill areas that would make them perform in this situation as well. By encouraging students to respond thoughtfully to a series of high level questions we can increase their level engagement with the materials. By using higher level questioning strategies students are forced to thinking about content in new and hopefully exciting ways.  A favorable outcome of this style of learning is that students’ thinking is not hampered by narrow questions that limit students potential.  Before higher level questioning can occur, however, every student must be working with similar academic language resources. This means that students must have a working definition of evaluate, recall, and application.  

Encouraging learning to deepen their understand of a particular topic cannot be solely motivated by grades. Ideally, grades are simply the reward for genuine interest and hard work.  Students need to know that they are indeed researchers themselves and are part of a larger network of academic thinkers. Students behave in classroom just like world-class researchers who think, collaborate and publish. In this process we hope to facilitate paradigms shifts in student thinking. The responsibility then is on the teacher to provide students with this opportunity and it is aided by using our local resources, integrating the subjects of reading, math, language and others and by offering concrete activities that are related to the real world.