How can you help students make meaning during exploration? Questioning!
In an NGSS classroom, the goal is for students to discover the content though exploration. (If you’re not sure what that means, check out these oldies — Adopting NGSS Instructional Strategies, Tangible Explore Experiences For The NGSS, and Creating Ah Ha Moments With The 5E Model). But not all explorations are made equal. There is a John Dewey quote I just love — “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”
When The Meaning Is Lost…
All too often, we engage our students in amazing activities and explorations. Students complete the work, they have fun, they seem to be learning… but when it comes down to it, they don’t walk away with any better understanding than when they started.
On the other hand, sometimes we present our students with an exploration, and they don’t even know where to begin. They don’t know what to do with the information provided. They struggle. They get frustrated. Sometimes it ends in behavior issues, sometimes it ends in quitting. Either way, no one learns anything here either.
In both examples, the problem is not necessarily in the experience. The exploration may not be the issue. Rather, the problem is in the way we have structured the reflection — or perhaps, failed to structure the reflection.
Experiences Are Just The Beginning
The experiences we give our students are just a starting point. Until students make the connections they need to make through a reflective process, they are just activities. The reflection is what turns a fun lab into a true exploration experience. The reflection is what leads to REAL learning.
So how can you help students reflect? Where do you begin?
Questioning Strategies To Support Meaning-Making
I help my students reflect on what’s happening during explore experiences by providing guiding questions, making my own observations, and engaging students in discussions during and after the activity.
First, I provide all students with graphic organizers and analysis questions for every explore activity we do. I ask students to make observations about what they see. Sometimes, my request is open-ended. “Record seven observations about patterns or trends you see in the data.” (I choose seven because it REALLY pushes students to take some risks and look DEEPER into the data they are analyzing!). Other times, I may give more direction: “Record three observations about the ways organisms interact.” My goal here is to help students begin interacting with the experience (whether it’s a lab, an engineering project, a card sort, or data analysis).
Then, I ask follow-up questions that help students to start making connections. These questions are very specific to the content, so it is harder to give general examples. That said, I might ask something like, “If you were to zoom in on _____, what do you think you would see?” Initially, students may not have been thinking about what they are NOT seeing. My guiding question starts that thought process. A follow up might be something like, “What do you know about temperature and water that might explain what you observed?”
Sometimes, I provide additional information in my analysis questions. “Warm water is able to hold more salt. As warm water accumulates salt, how might that affect the density?” Sometimes this information is new, and sometimes it is a review of what students learned in previous investigations. Either way, this information can support connection-making and also help students make predictions. These predictions (or hypotheses even) can lead into additional investigations of students’ design.
Questioning With Hedging Language
I want to point out one thing — when I develop my guiding questions, I use a lot of “hedging” language. “What do you think MIGHT explain…?” “What MIGHT happen…?” “What COULD connect…?” I want my students to feel comfortable taking risks with their ideas, and using this type of language encourages a degree of “guessing” — throwing out ideas that we can discuss. Maybe their ideas are wrong, but that’s OK in the exploration phase! Through discussion – and even argumentation — we can work toward correct understandings. It’s important, at this point, for students to just engage with the content intellectually, and oftentimes, students are hesitant to do that for fear of failure.
Questioning During Discussion
I wrap up my exploration activities with discussions. We talk about the questions they answered during the exploration, we reorganize data, we make new observations and connections. This follow-up is where corrections can be made, relevant content and vocabulary can be introduced, and all of that meaning-making happens and is solidified. It’s what takes students from the activity-fun to that final step of learning.
