Teaching film with high school students

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Abner Oakes

My son and I watched High Noon last weekend, our second time, and there’s so much packed into that short film: the great performances and characters, the camera work, its message on McCarthyism. He and I always have a lot to discuss as the film goes forward, in real-time, Will Kane waiting for that train and Frank Miller, and it reminded me how much I enjoyed teaching film as part of my high school English class.

(By the way, do you know The Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together by Boston Globe film critic and college classmate Ty Burr? A fun book for movie ideas. We refer to it all the time.)

There are many reasons to share classic films with high school students. I always enjoyed pulling apart the magic of various films, in the same way that we might tease apart a poem. I remember sharing with one class the shower scene from Psycho; we first let it run with sound; then we watched it without sound, to discuss the importance of its iconic soundtrack; and finally counted aloud the number of shots that comprise the scene, to talk about the editing, the various camera set ups and angles. It was great fun, to deconstruct a movie, to tease apart what makes it great, as we did with more traditional literature such as The Taming of the Shrew or Yeats’ The Second Coming. At the end of one film unit, a student remarked to me, with a smile, that I had ruined going to the cinema for her, for now she couldn’t help noticing the lighting of a scene or the music and its impact on the visuals. That comment made me happy.

I asked Alex O’Flinn, former student, good friend, and filmmaker, to weigh in on teaching film with high school students. Here’s what Alex had to say:

“The vocabulary a person learns from watching films is not just film vocabulary; it’s a visual vocabulary. As new forms of visual media emerge all around us, this language has become more vital than ever. While films will always retain their aspect of entertainment, we have reached a point in our society where visual language is no longer reserved for just entertainment but for communication. But as with any language, it must be learned. Yes, by just watching films there’s a lot a person can learn about visual aesthetics and storytelling – but it’s not enough. To really understand that aesthetic, a person must interact with film, deconstruct it, all the time asking, “Why, why, why?” Why did the director shoot the film using wide angle lenses? Why does the lighting in one scene have more contrast than in others? Why is a certain color palette used throughout the film? Everything in film is deliberate. Even if there’s a happy accident while shooting, that accident is examined thoroughly before it’s used in the film. By beginning to question and understand the logic to these decisions, a vocabulary develops, and what’s universal about this visual vocabulary is that it’s rooted in storytelling: How can I communicate this idea to an audience in the most clear, efficient, and thoughtful manner? For instance, take this situation:

“A father and son are walking down the street in Washington D.C. when a taxi cab runs a red light and hits another car. People start running towards the scene. The father remains calm and protects his son, who is very emotional. With people pushing by them to get to the accident scene, the father notices a bench nearby, and the two go to it to get away from the action.

“What does someone need to show visually to hit the story points mentioned above? What is the scene’s emotional arc? How should it be played out visually (close ups, wide shots, dolly moves, static shots, etc.)? What is the character arc for the father, for the son, and how should the actors playing them be directed? By answering these questions, a person interacts with the narrative, deconstructing it and creating a visual translation of the written work. Certain story and character beats are examined in close detail, and a corresponding visual plan is created.

“Much communication is rooted in the visual, and integrating the teaching of film into a school’s curriculum allows students to develop a robust visual vocabulary, on which they will become increasingly reliant as they develop their own voices as storytellers, as communicators.”

Great stuff, Alex – thank you. And, kind reader, see what folks are saying about Alex’s film Shoot the Moon. See it when it comes to your neighborhood.

Lastly, behind my film unit was my obvious love of the medium and its importance for me growing up – not just the movies but going to the movies. Piling in a car on the last day of sophomore year in high school to see a matinee of the just released Jaws. Sitting in the last row of the now gone movie theater at the Hamden Plaza to see Tommy. Eraserhead with Rob Bowers at New Haven’s Lincoln Theater. Watching Red River and Celine and Julie Go Boating in my film studies class with David Thomson sophomore summer in college. My first date with my wife? We saw Casablanca.

Going to movies was highly social for me, even if I saw something alone, since there were other people in the audience, laughing at the same lines, gasping at the same images. In our unit my students and I discussed the social power of film, a medium that, back in the olden days, brought large groups of people together, sat them close to each other, and turned off the lights. But things have changed, obviously. In Sunday’s New York Times Manohla Gargis wrote that movies “were part of what it meant to be modern. Viewers learned to dress and smoke and romance from movies, but they also learned how to be an audience…constituents in a new cultural democracy, one in which you voted by buying a ticket…We still commune with others when we watch a movie alone at home – if only in later conversation, online or in our head. But watching that movie with other people is a discrete experience from watching a clip on YouTube and noticing it has 200,000 hits, each a ghostly trace of someone else.”

Helping high school students better understand the innards of movies is a way to promote their communal nature. Our class was an example – right? – as the 20 of us discussed just what the heck was happening in Barton Fink. And by giving students that specialized vocabulary, as Alex wrote, we give them a set of tools with which to think critically about another, very omnipresent medium.

Important in all of this, though: Sure, dissect scenes. Get at what makes them work. But then rewind and let that movie run. Glory in the whole, in how all those individual parts mesh together. The lights dim in the theater, the title sequence washes over us, and we let go, the movie and its story channeling us along.

The High Noon image came from here. The Psycho poster image came from here. The Jaws image came from here. The poster image for Celine and Julie Go Boating came from here. The Casablanca image came from here.

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Transitioning from elementary to middle school

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Abner Oakes

Sleeping Giant Jr. HS, where I attended junior high - yup, its real name

I’m going re-purpose another piece from my past work place, The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement, this one a summary of research about elementary to middle school transition, since that process is starting in many schools districts this month. You can read the original piece here and a slightly edited version below. Here goes:

Within the body of research on middle school education, the literature on transitions to middle school includes a number of studies that have surveyed student perspectives. Largely, the results of these studies show that the physical/logistical aspects of the transition are most terrifying for young adolescents – issues like finding and opening a locker, changing classroom, dealing with locker rooms, and navigating crowded hallways.

Some of the research reflects the social concerns of students at this age: making new friends, being able to find and connect with friends from elementary school, and dealing with violence and/or bullying from older students. Some of the concerns are academic – meeting the increased academic demands and organizing for multiple subjects and long term assignments.

These concerns all reflect the psycho-social development of young adolescents. As young adolescents become aware of the world outside of their families, they struggle for both personal and group identity. Social issues become very important, and their self-efficacy is framed within their ability to feel competent and socially included.

The literature on transition to middle school offers a number of ideas for school administrators and teachers to help students make a smooth transition to middle school:

  • Provide several opportunities for incoming students to become familiar with the middle school.
    • Have older students visit 5th graders in the spring to talk about middle school.
    • Provide an informal evening at the middle school for incoming students and their parents.
    • Start the year off with an orientation for new students that covers all of the logistical concerns and points them to the people who can help. Include an opportunity to open a locker and tour the building. Show them a sample class schedule.
    • Establish a buddy system where each incoming student is assigned an older buddy for the first few weeks. Remember to train the buddies.
  • Provide an academic environment that encourages teacher support and peer interaction.
    • Cooperative learning classrooms
    • Team teaching
    • Use of learning academies/teams/houses as a structure for increasing a sense of belonging
    • Develop an inclusive program for special needs students, students who are behind in basic skills, and gifted and talented students so that these students have an opportunity to use their individual talents without being stigmatized for their differences or academic deficits.
    • Work with elementary teachers to articulate the curriculum.
  • Provide a supportive social environment.
    • Orient new students to extra-curricular activities.
    • Provide a variety of activities for a variety of interests (art, drama, sports, community service).
    • Encourage every student to participate.
    • Encourage positive social interaction both inside and outside of the classroom.
    • Work to provide a safe and orderly environment with a clear and well-enforced code of conduct supported by a positive discipline structure.
    • Institute regular activities and procedures that encourage parental participation. These can include evening activities to showcase student talents and achievements and creating an environment in the school so that parents feel welcome.

Resources

Alspaugh, J.W. (Sept/Oct 1998). Achievement loss associated with the transition to middle school and high school. The Journal of Educational Research, 92(1), 20-5.

Alspaugh, J.W. & Harting, R.D. (1995). Transition effects of school grade-level organization on student achievement. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 28(3), 145-9.

Anderman, E.M., Maehr, M.L., and Midgley, C. (1999). Declining motivation after the transition to middle school: Schools can make a difference. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 32(3), 131-147.

Anderman, L.H. (1999). Classroom goal orientation, school belonging and social goals as predictors of students’ positive and negative affect following the transition to middle school. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 32(2), 89-103.

Arowosafe, D.S. & Irvin, J.E. (1992) Transition to a middle level school: What kids say. Middle School Journal, 24(2), 15-19.

Battistich, V., Solomon, D., Kim D., ,Watson, M., and Schaps, E. (1995). Schools as communities, poverty levels of student populations, and students’ attitudes, motives, and performance: A multi-level analysis. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 627-658.

Eccles, J.S. & Midgley, C. (1989). Stage-environment fit: Developmentally appropriate classrooms for young adolescents. In C. Ames and R. Ames (eds.), Research on Motivation in Education, vol. 3, pp. 139-186, NY: Academic Press.

Eccles, J.S., Lord, S., & Midgley, C. (1991). What are we doing to early adolescents? The impact of educational contexts on early adolescents. American Journal of Education, 99(4), 521-543.

Fenzel, L.M. (1989). Role strains and the transition to middle school: Longitudinal trends and sex differences. Journal of Early Adolescence, 9(3), 211-226.

Huntinger, P.L. (1981). Transition practices for handicapped young children. What the experts say. Journal of the Division for Early Education, 2, 8-14.

Mizelle, N.B. & Mullins, E. (1997). Transition into and out of middle school, in Irvin, J.L. (ed). What Current Research Says to the Middle Level Practitioner. Columbus, OH: National Middle School Association, 303-313.

Mullins, E.R. (1997). Changes in young adolescents’ self-perceptions across the transition from elementary to middle school. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia, Athens.

Perkins, P.G. & Gelfer, J.I. (Jan/Feb. 1995). Elementary to middle school: Planning for transition. The Clearing House 68(3), 171-3.

Roeser, R.W., Eccles, J.S. & Sameroff, A.J. (May 2000). School as a context of early adolescents’ academic and social-emotional development: A summary of research findings. The Elementary School Journal, 100(5), 443-471.

Roeser, R.W., Midgley, C.M. & Urdan, T.C. (1996). Percepts of the school psychological environments and early adolescents’ psychological and behavioral functioning in school: The mediating role of goals and belonging. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, 408-422.

Schiller, K.S. (Oct. 1999). Effects of feeder patterns on students’ transition to high school. Sociology of Education, 72(4), 216-233.

Stoffner, M.F. and Williamson, R.D. (March 2000) Facilitating student transitions into middle school. Middle School Journal, 31(4), 47-51.

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The flipped classroom

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Abner Oakes

Back in November, I wrote in this post about the use of technology in elementary schools – or the lack of use – and this video, while about high school, has got me thinking again about technology and its effective use in (and out of) school.

The teachers profiled develop instructional videos using Camtasia, – here’s an example of their work – and students watch these during the evening, asynchronously, when they might normally do their homework. Students then come to class to, in short, do their homework – apply what they learned after watching their lesson the previous evening – flipping that homework/classroom work paradigm. One of the teachers, Aaron Sams, moves around the classroom and coaches and guides and puts out fires, as he says: “I’m no longer the guy who stands up in front of the classroom and yacks at a student for an hour.”

It reminded me of what former colleagues at Learning Point Associates wrote about in this piece, called Toward the Structural Transformation of School: Innovations in Staffing. While more radical, it’s along the same continuum as the flipped classroom, calling for education to become “unbundled,” “no longer wrapped in a neat brick-and-mortar school package.” They go on to write that in “a system of unbundled education, the teacher moves away from being the disseminator of information and toward being a facilitator of learning.”

Some folks view the effective teacher as the Robin Williams character from Dead Poets Society, and while there’s something to be said for the inspirational teacher that stands up on a desk and declaims – yes, been there, done that, early in my teaching career – there’s more to be said for the teacher that walks quietly around the room and shares his or her expertise with students that are at work – as we see in the flipped classroom. In fact, good listening and observational skills are probably the most important qualities of an effective teacher – as well as the willingness to let go. It certainly is not declaiming.

Back to the flipped/unbundled continuum. Education Week put out its annual Technology Counts issue, this one called K-12 Seeks Custom Fit: Schools Test Individualized Digital Learning. In it is a story on NYC’s Innovation Zone or iZone, a three-year initiative to test new ways for educating students, with a heavy emphasis on using digital tools to customize learning. There were other pieces on, again from New York City, its School of One and one on students customizing their own learning experiences, which began with an example from a social studies class at Philly’s Science Leadership Academy. But fear not: This customization does not devolve into chaos. I like how this last piece finished, stating that just ’cause “students may be skilled at using technology to personalize their own education, it doesn’t mean teachers should take a hands-off approach. In fact, students say they appreciate having a teacher” – here’s that word again – “guide them even more in how best to implement the technology, how to find trusted online sources of information, and how to organize and present that information.”

Ultimately, it’s not about technology. It’s about using effective and easily accessible tools to make learning relevant and interesting for students. All schools and school districts need to be encouraging the kind of experimentation that’s happening in that flipped classroom, in New York’s iZone, at the Science Leadership Academy. Principals and school district leaders need to give those experimenters some funding (Camtasia costs $300), their trust, and the time and space needed for thoughtful experimentation – just like Aaron Sams, his colleague Jonathan Bergman, and other like-minded teachers are doing for their kids.

More on the flipped classroom at this University of Northern Colorado site.

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Having an edge: Vibrant school culture

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Abner Oakes

I was a college counselor for several years, and one of the things that we talked about when we talked about counseling kids was the issue of “edges.” What edges did young people have that might lift them out of the pack that was applying to one college or another? It might be an intense commitment to a musical instrument or to community service or to an academic area that’s led to summer internships, etc. What can that student hang his or her hat on? Obviously, this idea can be applied to the world outside of college counseling, as we work with and nurture kids who can’t get enough of sea turtles or Alfred Hitchcock movies or raising money for the homeless.

I thought about edges when I spent two days at a charter school in a nearby urban center. That school easily had – let me say that again: easily had – the most vibrant, richest school culture I have encountered in any school during my almost 30 years of work. Yes, I know that I’m being hyperbolic, and perhaps I might ascribe equally strong school culture to some of the New England boarding schools that I’ve been to during my career, such as Belmont Hill and Exeter. But I had not experienced that kind of school culture for many years. It was revelatory to immerse myself in it for two days and see its impact on kids and staff and other community members.

School culture is a school’s climate, its atmosphere, its values. These authors call it core ideology. It defines the “enduring character of an organization – a consistent identity that transcends product or market life cycles, technological breakthroughs, management fads, and individual leaders.”

It is any school’s edge – what sets it apart from other schools. The building I visited showed its edge the moment I walked in. Thirty minutes at the start and end of each day was devoted to a school meeting that featured music, announcements, praise for student and faculty accomplishments, and rituals that have been with the school for its almost 15 years of existence. Craig Jerald writes in this brief about five kinds of behaviors at a school that “send strong signals about vision and values,” all of which I saw in abundance:

  • Rituals: celebrations and ceremonies, rites of passage, and shared quirks and mannerisms
  • Hero Making: role models, hierarchies, public rewards, and mentors
  • Storytelling: shared humor, common anecdotes, foundation myths, and both oral and written history
  • Symbolic Display: decoration, artwork, trophies, and architecture
  • Rules: etiquette, formal rules, taboos, and tacit permissions

The rituals and their language that I saw in the morning meeting continued in the classrooms, in the hallways; I was in a kindergarten class that spent the last few minutes of the class period preparing for its part of the end-of-school-day gathering. These little ones recited a poem, and their concentration showed me that they already knew how important this stuff was to the school.

Educators in schools with excellent school culture “talk about it and work on it as if it were a tool they can shape and wield to achieve outcomes they desire,” as Jerald wrote, and at this charter school, the school’s principal, other leaders, teachers, and other staff members were important to the transmittal of its culture. But I got the feeling that the school’s culture would do fine without them. It was such an integral part of the school that, in some ways, people did not matter. This school and its rich culture would live on, no matter who was there.

Some schools talk about having a vibrant school culture, but oftentimes that professed culture feels superficial once you spend time in the building. Some schools build their so-called culture around character issues, with words-of-the-week aligned with positive character traits – it’s Responsibility Week! – and the occasional all-school assembly with a speaker and skits. Hang out in these schools, and you find it’s pretty fake and that the real school culture has little to do with the professed culture.

If you’re interested in more about the school culture/character connection, read Casey Carter’s new book, On Purpose: How Great School Cultures From Strong Character. And here is Casey on C-SPAN Thanksgiving day morning.

Too many schools feel edgeless. Kids might perform well. The school might be a pleasant place, with smiling teachers and kids and leaders. But it feels managed, not led. It feels very unremarkable – unlike the school I visited. Or those that Casey profiles in his book. These are schools with edges, with chutzpah, schools that are confident of their successes and shout them out with uniqueness, with individuality. They always lead with their culture.

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Higher level thinking in high school Spanish

Posted on March 13, 2011 by Abner Oakes

I got a great long note from my former student Maija Langeland Scarpaci, who taught high school Spanish for several years. Let me just move aside and let her do the talking:

During my last teaching job, I taught the highest and lowest levels of Spanish offered at my high school – AP Spanish Literature and Basic Spanish, which had lots of kids with IEPs – and loved teaching both classes equally. But because I’m someone who likes to talk about concepts and ideas, I found the curriculum as it was designed for the lower level to be unsatisfying. So I changed it.

After doing some research, we found that many kids in Basic Spanish weren’t going beyond a year or two of Spanish study, and as there was no language requirement for students in the school’s special education program, the kids weren’t encouraged to continue. But I wondered if traditional basic language classes weren’t particularly advantageous to these kids. Maybe the material was (1) boring for them, (2) frustrating for them, and (3) not relevant to their lives. My department head and I sat down and asked, How important is it that these kids are able to perfectly conjugate “-ar” verbs in Spanish? Not very, we decided. Would we rather that they know more about issues that are relevant to the Spanish-speaking world and therefore to them, since there are so many Spanish speakers in the US? Yes, we decided.

We redesigned the curriculum so that it would address more issues and less grammar, and ultimately I had them reading lots of the same stuff that my AP kids were reading, or at least by the same authors, but in English. These kids were exposed to Darío, Cervantes, and García Márquez – not easy stuff, even in English.  We devoured newspapers, reading endlessly about current events; the students were amazed by the number of articles we found about issues that were relevant to Spanish class and to the US, even in our part of the country. We watched some great documentaries; a class favorite was one about the coffee trade in South America, as my students discovered parallels between their coffee habits and the coffee farmers and their families thousands of miles away. We also watched a fascinating episode of 30 Days. Its focus was a Texas Minuteman who lived for a month with a family of illegal Mexican immigrants in LA.

Now, instead of talking about the weather and colors, my students were dealing with more advanced (and interesting!) ideas than they would have otherwise, which enabled us to talk at a different level (there’s only so much you can say about the weather in Spanish). In the class as it was originally designed, much of the questioning and material for tests would be from Bloom’s most basic level, but we were able to do so much more in the new class:

  • Prediction: After researching the Minuteman trend along our borders, did the kids think the Minuteman in the 30 Days episode would return to his work at the border, or would his month spent with the family change his perspective on immigration?
  • Analysis: I asked my students: Why do you think he changed his mind? What happened in the show that caused his new perspective?
  • Application: Right after we completed this unit, there was a huge bust at a New Bedford, MA factory, and over 300 women who were working there were deported to their home countries. It was very controversial because many were mothers with babies, many still nursing, and they were separated from them without any regard for the children. My students were able to look at this situation with more insight and perhaps more empathy by applying what they already knew to be common to many immigrant situations.

It’s not lost on me that my best teachers and classes were in high school and grad school; those were my smallest classes and the ones where the teachers were most interested in what the students had to say. Students talk when questions are good. My AP students were always very happy to answer any questions, but the students in my Basic Spanish class were much more reluctant. I had to draw them in and did so by using materials and asking questions that were relevant to them or to life. I let them know that I was interested in their opinions.

Of course, there are many ways to do this while speaking Spanish, too. When I was a teaching fellow at Boston College, I had a great mentor; she taught all the introductory Spanish classes at the college, I never heard her use a word of English, and I thought, How is that possible? But she showed her students how to use the language instead of telling them, by performing and by asking her students to do the same. Everything was acted out, over-dramatically, in order to make her points stick. During one lesson on the subjunctive mood, she had a male student down on one knee as he proposed to a female student in front of a very amused class. Her questions were not particularly analytical or evaluative but required students to be expressive, essentially the opposite approach/scenario of the one described above in the high school course. In a college level introductory language course, with very bright and very willing students, the lessons and the questions remained very basic, in order for her to achieve the goal set by the department, which was to use only Spanish and have the students master basic Spanish.

At my high school, in my introductory course, with students who struggled academically (and often socially), the lessons and the questions were less basic, more complex, based less on grammar and more on real life, all in order to meet our goals: Keep students enrolled in Spanish, have them feel and be successful in the course, and open up their minds to ideas and situations they had not encountered before.

The “hola” image came from this site. The Don Quixote image came from here. The photo of Garcia Marquez came from this blog. The photo of Dario came from here. The photo of coffee cherries came from here.

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Rigor and asking good questions

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Abner Oakes

I’ve been thinking about rigor these past few weeks, as I’ve had the chance to be in schools and classrooms – always a treat. Just what constitutes rigor in the classroom? What does it mean for students to step up and undertake rigorous work? And what do effective teachers do to push rigor?

A lot has to do with the kinds of questions that teachers ask – or do not ask. I heard a teacher say a few weeks ago, “Don’t interrupt their struggle” – well put, huh? Step aside, right? Be quiet and let your students work. I always got weird looks from my 9th graders when I waited quietly between their or my questions or comments, ultimately allowing them to fill that space with their thinking. At least I got weird looks when I began this practice in the fall, sharing with them the concept of wait-time and why I was doing it; in just a few weeks, someone in my class would always end up saying something like, “Well, I’m going to speak since Mr. Oakes is doing his ‘wait-time thing’,” and off we’d go. (Two pieces on wait time: Using “Think-Time” and “Wait-Time” Skillfully in the Classroom and Wait-Time and Rewards as Instructional Variables: Their Influence on Language, Logic, and Fate Control.)

Paired with wait time, effective questioning can further spur kids to deeper thinking. I know, I know: Not earth-shattering, but then how come in classrooms I so often hear many, many questions that elicit knowledge or relatively low-level thinking? “So, when did the Civil War end?” “How does a lenticular cloud get formed?” “Who was the antagonist in that Faulkner short story?” Sure, students need this knowledge base before they move on to more difficult concepts. I hear that all the time from teachers, and they’re so right on. However – and this is a big “however” – are teachers carefully planning, carefully scaffolding their questions for their charges so that those questions move from the remembering and understanding levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy to the levels of applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating? (See helpful graphics here for Bloom’s.)

It ain’t easy, I know. It ain’t easy to plan to move questions in this path and then step into the classroom, where things can (ideally) go in any number of directions. Effective teachers work hard to balance their careful planning with a readiness to exploit teachable moments. In fact, for the most effective teachers, those that are highly attuned to their classroom, to their subject matter, and to their kids, their development of questions takes these detours into account and will encourage new discourse, new paths.

I know too that effective teachers redirect questions: they pose one question to more than one student. I also like when a teacher queries her kids, gets an answer, and then turns to another student and says, “So, Kyle, what’s your opinion of Jamie’s answer? How does her answer square with your thinking about that story’s end?”

I put this idea of rigor and effective questioning out to a few teacher friends, to see what they had to say. Danielle Lei, a former student of mine and now a teacher at this Denver school, wrote that these kinds of questions “can be the hook that draws students into a lesson or a text.” Friend and neighbor Bob Scribner, who teaches English at this Rockville, MD middle school, feels that “an aspect of this [question-asking] is asking open-ended ones that require synthesis of different texts/concepts/ideas to come up with an answer. There’s supposed to be more than one answer. One good way to use it is to introduce the question to groups so that students can then work together and flesh out what’s being sought after.” I like Bob’s strategy a lot – and then imagine having those groups present out and reflect on the different paths that they took with that one question. Cool.

Lastly, Kathryn Bremner, a friend, former middle school teacher, and former colleague at Modern Red SchoolHouse, wrote that “I don’t believe teachers plan appropriately when it comes to the questions they will ask in their classrooms. Honestly, I think many are so focused on mastery of content for testing purposes, they forget the value of higher level thinking. But one way teachers can be certain they are checking for mastery as well as for high level thinking is to use exit passes on a daily basis. Exit passes give every student in the classroom a voice as well as an opportunity for the teacher to check for understanding. In my opinion, teachers with rigor are using quick, ungraded, reflective opportunities on a daily basis in their classroom.” Yes, yes – a great way to assess their learning.

My last comment: It takes time to create this kind of investigative culture in the classroom. Effective teachers model for and practice with their students; they look to March and April for true success, not next week, and they ultimately want to give over the act of question-asking to their charges. A teacher’s done her job when her students are the ones asking thoughtful, invigorating, even risky questions. As this piece states near its end, when students pose or initiate good questions, “they have more ownership in the learning process and become active participants, responsible for their own growth.” They also learn something that they will carry forward outside of school: Connecting with others through respectful curiosity.

A few pieces on effective questioning: Using Questioning to Stimulate Mathematical Thinking, Are Teachers Asking the Right Questions?, Assessing the Relationship Between Questioning and Understanding to Improve Learning and Thinking (QUILT) and Student Achievement in Mathematics, and Inviting Student Engagement with Questioning.

The above apple image came from here.

I don’t believe teachers plan appropriately when it comes to the questions they will ask in their classrooms.  Honestly, I think many are so focused on mastery of content for testing purposes, they forget the value of higher level thinking.  But, one way teachers can be certain they are checking for mastery as well as high level thinking is to use exit passes on a daily basis.  Exit passes give every student in the classroom a voice as well as an opportunity for the teacher to check for understanding.  In my opinion, teachers with rigor are using quick, ungraded, reflective opportunities on a daily basis in their classroom.
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