So another year has started, and I'm at a new school. The school is great, colleagues knowledgable and friendly, but it's still been a tough adjustment to learn a new curriculum, a new culture, a new way of doing things. I'm finally at the point where I'm feeling ready to try picking up where I left off at the end of last year in terms of my action research.
I'm in the middle of exploring the questioning process with our first whole class Q Focus around "school". I launched this Q focus with the read aloud "A Fine, Fine School". Students had no problem generating questions in groups, and most groups generated many questions around school. However, I feel like I may have rushed us into the prioritizing of question. I used Jon Muth's "The Three Questions" to try and prompt students to get into the mindset of deliberately choosing the most important question from the list that they'd generated. But I felt like once I let my kids off, the process was very muddled. Many groups chose questions that felt random, like "Why don't they serve dessert during lunch?"
I think that this is a result of me not being specific enough with the Q focus. I think I could improve the Q Focus to: "School's effects" or something like that. But at this point, I think it's going to be more productive to just move forward and use this 1st experience as a learning one. I will give students a short questionnaire tomorrow to see how students explain their reasoning behind the question that they prioritized.
When we start a Q Focus around "Tiger Rising" then I'll teach them about categorizing questions around Bloom's Taxonomy, and we'll look back on this first round of questions, categorize them, and reflect on what types of questions they asked about the first q focus. I'd like to start teaching them Bloom's to help them start applying questioning with their independent reading books, and get them to start thinking about how the types of questions they ask about their books reflects how well they understand the book and how much they're getting out of it. I also need to get the Book Nooks up so that students can start publicly displaying their questions.
I think that my research question is starting to come into focus for this year. Something like:
"How does teaching students to the Question Formulation Technique in conjunction with Bloom's Taxonomy affect how they read?"
