Discussions

Your Name and Title:
Reuben Thiessen, CTO

School or Organization Name:
Edify

Co-Presenter Name(s):
None.

Area of the World from Which You Will Present:

Southern California, United States of America

Language in Which You Will Present:
English

Target Audience(s):

Teachers, Students, Leadership

Short Session Description (one line):

Learning to Ask Better Questions, Together.

Full Session Description (as long as you would like):

Question generation is a valuable strategy that has been proven to increase students comprehension of specific topics; however, this is a skill that is seldom explicitly taught. This as a big problem. The skill of thinking and learning with questions, what we call “inquiry-based learning,” is important!

Think of it like going from having one tool, to having an entire tool box. A question is a tool for retrieving and interacting with new knowledge and concepts. And often, students will only use questions as a simple tool in a basic cognitive sense, asking just a retrieval question (one that asks who, what, where, when), to find an answer.

When people take a metacognitive approach to question generation, (metacognitive in this case meaning thinking about the type of question being asked, not just asking the question), they build a toolbox for thinking critically.

An important part of inquiry-based learning is to ask questions, and lots of them! The question generation process comes alive when students collaborate to explore new pathways of knowledge generated by questions. Utilizing SMILEglobal (smile.stanford.edu) software, which is freely available, students within the same classroom can collaborate on questions they form in response to lessons learned in class.  The nature of the software also helps provide an equitable platform for all student voices to join in the grappling of new knowledge presented in class. Built into the process is feedback from the fellow students to further enhance the learning and exploration through questions.

The web-based nature of SMILEglobal allows for an open collaboration between geographically disbursed groups, where interactions can happen both synchronously and asynchronously between various group-members. Time and borders can be overcome to allow different perspectives and new knowledge to be shared across the globe.

This session will give an overview of metacognitive question generation and then demonstrate a practical way, using SMILEglobal (smile.stanford.edu) for students to collaborate as they generate questions.

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:

http://smile.stanford.edu

http://www.askbetter.io