After my midterm conference with my PRT and CT, we decided that it should be a goal of mine to focus less on management skills, and more on student learning. I believe that asking purposeful questions is a key element of promoting student thinking and assessing student learning, so for this Science lesson, I collected data on the types of questions I asked within the lesson. I wanted to first focus on specific question types, so while watching the video of my lesson, I took tallies of the number of times I asked yes/no questions, questions with 1 word, or 1 correct answer, and open-ended questions. The results are as follows:
Yes/No: IIIII IIIII IIII 1 word/1 correct answer: IIIII III Open-ended: IIIII IIIII Upon analyzing this data, I noticed that I asked more yes/no questions than any other type of question. Fourteen is a large number of yes/no questions, however, in comparison to the number of open-ended questions I asked, I don’t feel like the number of yes/no questions is overwhelming. When I asked yes/no questions, they were typically followed by an open-ended question. That is a scaffolding strategy I’ve built in to try to guide some of my ESE students. I do think though, that I need to increase the number of open ended questions I use and try to incorporate some question stems to make my open ended questions a higher level of complexity. Also, my data may not be completely accurate due to the fact that I could only here the conversation I had with the group directly in front of the camera. During the entire lesson I circulated the room and questioned all of the groups, but I could not hear those questions on the video and therefore could not collect any data on those questions. |