Are we asking the right questions at the right time?

Before I begin, here’s a short disclaimer. This is by no means an original idea. I’m sure teachers have been doing what I discuss in this blog for a long, long time. This is simply an account of my own experience with the concept of 'big questions'. I've also seen 'big questions' being used in different ways to what I'm going to discuss. Whatever approach you agree with, I hope you find something of use here.

I always hated learning objectives. I never understood them. I kept getting objectives and outcomes confused and I couldn’t get my head around the fact that objectives weren’t really measurable despite being told multiple times they were. After all, an objective is a goal which tells us they’re not always successful; not everyone reaches theirs despite the fact they think they have.

When I raised this concern in training I was given a whole host of assessment for learning techniques that would apparently tell me whether or not a student was reaching the objective I had set for them and ‘making progress’. Cue continuum lines and images of stick men hiking up crudely drawn mountains with the bottom of the mountain meaning a student was completely stuck and the top of the mountain meaning they had conquered their goal. Anyone looking through my books would have thought students were getting on fine. The stick men had always climbed a little higher every time I ‘checked for progress’ and the cross on continuum lines always moved in the right direction. (It pains me just to type this!)

Some AfL methods were sublime. Most, quite frankly, were ridiculous.

At the time, I should have realised that this was absurd. I would always set up these methods with the line, “Don’t put down what you think I want to see. Be honest.” Looking back I can tell what I was really saying was, “I have no faith in this quick progress check. I’m getting you to do it because I have to but it’s not really going to tell me whether you understand what the lesson is about.”

Let’s park this aside for a moment. I’ll return to it later. For now, I’m going to talk about ‘Macbeth’. Every year I ask my Year 11 students which GCSE text they have found the most challenging and their response is nearly always ‘Macbeth’. It’s hardly surprising. Shakespeare’s language alone can be incredibly complex for students to understand, yet despite my efforts to try and make this easier, Year 11 still bemoan the fact that they don’t know the play very well; they never feel confident going into the exam hall and every year I find myself running revision sessions on plot and character, feeling extremely concerned and wondering why they don’t know the basics by now. It’s easy to say, “that student hasn’t revised.” It’s not always as easy to ask, “Where am I, the teacher, going wrong here?” This year, with the prospect of another confused Year 11 class looming over me, I asked myself three questions:

1.     What do I need my students to know?

2.     Why didn’t previous years know it?

3.     How can I check they know it this year?

I could answer the first question easily, the second and third not so much. I didn’t find my answer until I stumbled across Joe Kirby’s blog titled, ‘How to plan a knowledge-led unit in English’ which you can find here. In this blog, Kirby talks about a SOW he has put together for students studying ‘Oliver Twist’. Each lesson has one question and on first look, they’re surprisingly simple. The first question for the first lesson, for example, is ‘Who was Charles Dickens?’ I believe this unit is for a KS3 scheme but I thought about what these questions would look like when applied to a GCSE text. Considering what I need students to know when studying ‘Macbeth’, I put the following together:

Many will look at this table and immediately accuse me of failing to challenge my students. ‘Who is Macbeth?’ and ‘What do Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do after the murder?’ after all, are not particularly stretching. Yet at this point, that’s what I need them to know. What I want them to know comes later. This approach works because of its simplicity. It allows us to strip everything back, to declutter and focus on core concepts and ideas.

Why, then, are they called ‘big questions’? The answer is simple. For me, they are the biggest questions we could ask and by far the most important. They are the questions students need to know and remember in order to understand everything that follows. There’s no point in discussing Macbeth’s Machiavellian characteristics (or reading extracts from 'The Prince') if I have a student who doesn’t understand the concept of ambition or tyranny. This is where I was going wrong before. I was too eager to introduce my students to higher level ideas before I had established they knew the text properly. Some teachers get around this with the idea of a 'cold read'. I'm not always in favour of this approach but it works in similar ways. Perhaps this was a case of running before we could walk. The pressures of the exam make us want our students to stand out among the rest but why would we introduce our students to literary criticism etc if they don’t have a full, complete understanding of the text being scrutinised? I’m not saying we can’t teach our students these bigger ideas. They’re rich in knowledge and open doors for further exploration. However, I do think we need to ask ourselves the following: are we asking the right questions at the right time? Students need to understand the core concepts that underpin a text before we start asking the questions that will make them immerse themselves in wider critical ideas. This understanding cannot and should not be rushed.

This is why I discussed learning objectives and AfL at the beginning of this post. Because by using a ‘big question’ approach you can tell, quite clearly, what a student knows and doesn’t know. Students can either answer the question or they can’t. This isn't to say that we shouldn't be stretching our higher ability pupils, but activities need to be clearly sequenced and baseline knowledge established. 

Having now taught ‘Macbeth’ to my current Year 10 class, I can already see a huge difference in their knowledge of the text. They’re retaining more and are making links between characters, themes and events that can only come from knowing that text well. Now I know they have understood the play in its entirety, I can start introducing ideas and concepts I want them to know.

Asking the 'Big Questions'

Every lesson begins with a big question, the one thing I want students to be able to know by the time they walk out of my classroom. I also need students to retain the answers to these questions. If I see a student walking down the corridor, six or seven months later and I ask them one of the big questions, they need to be able to answer it with clarity and precision. If a student rambles on verbally or in writing, I would argue that they don’t know it properly because they can’t explain it clearly.

I’m able to test whether a student has retained the answers to these big questions in lots of different ways (multiple choice quizzes, extended writing etc) yet I’ll discuss the method I’ve found most useful below:

Every so often in the scheme, I will give my students all the big questions they have encountered in the unit so far and I’ll ask them to answer in as much detail as they can. Here’s an example:

I then incorporate what I learned from Rebecca Foster’s excellent blog on ‘self quizzing’. In a different colour pen, I ask students to write down all the missing gaps in their knowledge using a resource which I often think is overlooked in the classroom. Each other. Students get up and discuss the questions, adding anything of use in their different colour before we then discuss as a class with further additions to the sheets if necessary. This is a way of keeping these core concepts ticking over.

It will look something like this:

As knowledge of the text increases, student answers also develop. For example, one of the early big questions in this ‘Macbeth’ scheme is, ‘Who is Macbeth?’ At this point, we were studying the Captain’s speech in Act 1, Scene 2 and so student answers would reflect what he says about the character: he is brave, noble and loyal. However, the next time I gave the big questions to students, we had read to the end of Act 2 and answers began to include ideas about his betrayal and his ability to commit brutal acts against the people he loves.

When students finish the scheme, they receive every big question which becomes, in a way, a knowledge organiser of the plot, characters and themes once it is completely filled out. When we move on to the next text, they will receive these same questions again at various intervals on top of the questions for the text currently being studied.

They are big questions because they need to be revisited, revised and reflected upon. They are quick, simple and easy to check but their importance cannot be understated. 

Stuart

(@SPryke2)

All resources from the 'Macbeth' scheme mentioned in this blog can be found here.