Third Type of Student Response: Question

Last Monday, we had a professional development day at Lakeland High School. We worked in teams to create SLOs and worked on self-evaluations. It was great to have a day to catch up on all the paperwork. Wednesday we had an ENL meeting after school. I am excited about some upcoming ENL conferences. The first one is next Saturday, October 6th. I will be driving down to Indy for the INTESOL conference. It will be great to collaborate with other ENL educators! It was a short week, but it was very full!

This week, I introduced the third and final (as of right now :P) structured student response: question. By far, this response was the most challenging for students. Students are very often brimming with questions, but when requesting questions about a certain topic or about what we just heard, students were not sure where to start. I am going to reteach this student response and give students more practice with it next week. The whole point of question is to get students to think about where their prior knowledge and experiences END. We have finite knowledge and question helps us to find out more.

Question - I want to know more.

Left hand pointer finger points to the top middle of your head. Right hand pointer finger points to your belly button. When I look at you, I should "see" a question mark.There are several types of questions; factual, clarifying, opinion. Factual questions can be found right in the text or by asking a person directly. What color is Greg's hat? We can find that answer by looking at his hat. The answer is right there. Clarifying questions are asked when we heard or read something, but don't understand it. Where does my homework go? Opinion questions are asked when we want to know what someone thinks. Do you like spinach? There is no right or wrong answer here, but just a personal viewpoint.

For this first introduction, we mostly focused on factual and opinion questions. We looked at different question words that can start a sentence; who, what, where, when, why, how, do, did, does, can, may, are, etc. Click here for my question word cards. Students practiced asking each other questions and forming answers for those questions. We also worked on follow-up questions if we want even more information. We looked at different ending marks used for question and statement sentences.

Up next: Technoloy Week - I will be using computers in my lessons all week next week. Stay tuned for cool tech tool links!