Which One and Why? - Part 1

Why Should We Use Questions Like “Which One and Why?”

    Think about the way people ask questions.  Think about the way we, as teachers, ask questions.  The ways we ask can be just as important as the question itself.  There are several important things that can make a good question better.  Think about these two questions and consider how each makes you feel:

1.     Are you a good teacher?

2.     What is one of the things you do well as a teacher?

    What goes through your mind when I ask you if you are a good teacher?  That question could make you feel like I would and it would make me wonder: How good is good? What if I am only good 60% of the time? Is that good? Do I need to include the lessons that I knew I didn’t do justice to?  Will it make me look bad if I say “No”? Will it make me seem prideful if I say “Yes”? Is this just based on my ability in the classroom or should it also reflect how I care about my students? What is the questioner really trying to find out?  These feelings may be similar to how students feel when we ask some of our closed-ended questions.

    That first question has so many potholes that the road should be closed.  One of the things the second question does well is that it offers multiple accurate responses.  Does that question make you feel differently?  Did at least one thing pop immediately into your mind?  Which of those two questions would you be more interested in talking to other teachers about?

    Questions that invite multiple responses are just one hallmark of better questions and they are the basis of one of the positives of questions like “Which One and Why?”  When I first saw the book Which One Doesn’t Belong? by Christopher Danielson, I was both excited and irritated.  I was excited because the idea was fabulous and irritated because I hadn’t thought of it exactly like that myself.  I have always loved asking my students to look for patterns and find similarities and differences but without the careful planning involved in “Which One Doesn’t Belong?”  Since then, I have seen other wonderfully-crafted multi-response products.

    My thought for “Which One and Why?” is to make something that was also open-ended but to tie them to Standards and to give possible solutions (and, yes, your students will absolutely think of others). The “Why?” is the most significant part.  Students may often be surprised by something they didn’t notice themselves and this, too, makes them better thinkers.  My suggestion for how to use these are to accept any answer that is actually true. You could also ask students to think of at least two possible solutions.

 Let’s look at one together.

The one shown is tied to Common Core State Standard (CCSS) K.CC.4 Understand the relationship between numbers and quantities; connect counting to cardinality.

If you teach grades K – 2, possible answers will probably come quickly to mind.  If you teach higher grades, think about kids you have interacted with, aged 5-8.  What do you think is the most basic possibility? In other words, which do you think the most struggling student would choose (and why?)?  What about more advanced students?  Can you see reasons for all four possibilities?  List as many as you can. 

So, if you can see how many possibilities there are, you can see the many entry points your students would have and how much students could talk about with this simple problem.  This is one of the ways in which we can ask better questions and one of the reasons I enjoy these so much.

Below are some of the “hows” I have identified: