One common cognitive roadblock in this step is something I call “passing the baton.” If you’ve ever seen a relay race, you know that no single person completes the whole race. A baton or stick is passed from one person to another to another until the entire distance is traversed.
This may also happen when we ask questions. Instead of asking a single student to summarize or outline the whole of something, we may do something like this: “John, can you tell me about A?” and then “Mary, can you tell me about part B?” and “Sam, what happened in part C?” If the students answer correctly, intuitively it may feel like a summary has been achieved because all the parts of the content have been mentioned. But no single student has actually done a complete summary of A, B and C.
There may be a good reason to split-up the summary amongst several students. For one thing, we may want to get more students to participate, which is a good intention. However, by doing so, we diminish the amount of summary each student actually ends up doing. We must strike a balance here.
Another consideration might be that we fear that when one student talks for too long in attempting to summarize something, the other students will tune out. If John talks for a minute while attempting to summarize, how do we control the attention of Mary and Sam?
To help with this, you may tell students in advance that they may “cheat” off the previous summaries they hear. It turns out it’s pretty hard to remember everything someone else said about something if they talked for even a little bit. Eventually, you begin to modify or internalize the summary they started with.
Going back to our example, it would be better to ask, “John, tell me about A, B and C?” and then say, “Mary, you heard what John said, so now tell me about A, B, and C in your own way?” But take note, don’t allow students to just say, “Uh, what she said.” If a student says that, say, “Okay, then, exactly what did she say?”
In workshops, I tell a story about how these first three steps of questioning really can make a difference not only in academics but even in regular life. A year ago, I had to attempt several home remodeling projects. Fortunately, my friend, Chris was a really hard worker. We would barely start the day and he’d just want to rush out and buy the materials required for that day’s project. But I noticed that we kept missing items or got the wrong ones and so I was going to the hardware store several times in a day. It was clear we needed more structure.
I started out by asking Chris questions to identify and label the tools or materials we’d need for the tasks at hand. Each day, we created a list of those things before we went to the store. We started going to the store less often.
I then noticed that sometimes, we’d have something on the list and get back to the project only to find it was missing a related item. To put it simply, we’d go and get a hammer only to find we were missing nails. So, I started to ask Chris how each item on the list was related to the project or what it needed it
function--making connections. One time, I asked Chris why he needed a particular tool and he eventually had to admit that it wasn’t related to anything, he just wanted it. That was what I call a question that found a disconnection!
As you might guess, we became much more efficient but I found that asking Chris to make a short summary of what he intended to do each day helped to organize our projects even better. He’d sometimes change the order of the day after thinking it through.
The three steps of questions took some time to ask. Chris was mostly used to just start working, not thinking through the tasks of a project sequentially. But I think the questions not only saved me time and money, they changed the way Chris thought about working and developed some concrete critical thinking skills in him, too.
Chapter 18: Cognitive Step 4--Applying and
Predicting
After we have made some short summaries and assuming there is no need to answer written-test questions, we continue our examination of the content and ask students to apply, predict, or assume a change in the underlying information.
Questions in this fourth step are based on the idea of some sort of change in the content and the outcomes of that change. For example, we might ask, “How would the outcome have been different if this change had/ had not happened?” Or “What would happen if X were made negative?”
Interestingly, these kinds of questions are less common on state tests, though they certainly do develop higher-level critical thinking skills. One explanation for their scarcity on tests might be that when you ask students to make predictions, the scope of reasonable answers becomes larger. If you ask, “According to the story, what is likely to happen?” it becomes harder to have only a single, correct answer.