Questioning in the Classroom

In a recent assignment for a PODetc course (Introduction to Instructional Technology in the Classroom), a student delivered a well-organized post which demonstrated nicely a train of thought that might occur when we really start to evaluate a seemingly common process: questioning.

The activity prompt is as follows:
Discussion Forum: Sharing Your Research Question
Post your research question in the discussion forum below. Share the context of the curriculum and desired outcome of this research question. Identify what level of Blooms taxonomy your question falls under. Finally, Identify how technology can be used as a tool to promote critical thinking, problem solving, and or decision-making.

Chris from Chilton posted the following:
When I began this assignment, I thought about different units that teachers do at my school already, and came up with a combination of an English unit on Brave New World and a Psychology unit on advertising. I thought it might be neat if these two teachers could get together at some point and work on these questions:

Main Question: Are our minds manipulated by outside sources, such as the media and government? If so, is it always bad for us? Take a side and be prepared to defend your view.

Then one thing led to another and I thought of more questions to go along with that:

How can we become critical consumers of information?

If you were able to create your own “Brave New World”, how would you deal with issues of the media, advertising, and mind manipulation?

I believe these questions would involve analysis, evaluation and synthesis. Students would work in groups and would first need to do some research on different kinds of advertising and its effects on people. I would direct them to the library research databases that we have at the school, which include EBSCO, ProQuest, America's Newspapers and SIRS. They might use technologies such as cellphones, flipvideo cams, digital cameras, camcorders or DVD's to record examples of different types of advertising. Later they could even make sample commercials of their own with these technologies. I can see students using tables or spreadsheets to compare the goals and techniques of modern advertising with the brainwashing techniques of the novel Brave New World. They might find using Inspiration or the Seeing Reason Tool to help them organize their thoughts. If the teachers want to get really involved, they could use Second Life to help students create their own “Brave New World”.

I think the main technology tool though would be the "Showing Evidence Tool" from the Intel Thinking Tools. Once they have decided whether the media and government is using mind manipulation and have taken a stand for or against, they would use this tool to assemble their research and arguments, in order to defend their viewpoints. After using this tool and others as mentioned above, students have spent a lot of time using critical thinking skills on something that is relevant to them today, and that they need to be aware of. Students could be asked to present their viewpoint either in a debate style format or other presentation format.

Given the right type of question to start with and with support from the tools that we have encountered in this class, students will learn to think more critically, and at higher levels than just recording facts and memorizing. This will serve them well as they progress through school, and into the world of work.

Chris@Chilton

Well done, Chris, and thanks for letting me share it!