When I was in high school, many of my teachers spent class time lecturing while the students copied down copious amounts of detailed notes that meant little to nothing to us. During my first year of teaching, the year all teachers know to be survival at best, I found myself mimicking some of those poor pedagogical methods. Consequently, my students were mentally slipping away at an alarming rate.
I quickly realized that I was afraid to allow students to have a voice in the classroom. What if they say something goofy and disrupt class, or what if they answer incorrectly, and then I have to be responsible for potentially embarrassing them in front of their peers? Years later, I still possess my fair share of fears about teaching, but allowing my students to have a voice is no longer one of them.
One of my favorite books to teach is Elie Wiesel's Night, which is powerful and captivating and usually a book that my students thoroughly enjoy. Early in the text, Elie is interacting with a unique character, Moishe the Beadle, who evokes genuine thought in Elie's young mind by questioning the motives for his actions, questions that Elie finds himself unable to answer. Moishe follows his inquiries with the comment "that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer …" (Wiesel, 1958, p. 5).
What simple, yet profound words! No wonder my earliest teaching possessed no power to engage my students; I was not allowing any space for the students to interact with the questions as I raced on to the revelation of the "right" answer.
I have come to rely on the following strategies for developing questions that promote critical thinking; assess deeper learning and, ultimately, encourage a pursuit of knowledge:
1. Use divergent rather than convergent questions.
Although teachers sometimes just need confirmation that a student knows specific information (the knowledge or comprehension levels of Bloom's taxonomy), most learning objectives leave room for divergent questioning, which allows each student to "diverge" into different thinking paths rather than "converging" on the single right answer. This type of questioning allows students of varying learning styles and levels to ponder the same issue, develop different answers, and not necessarily be wrong. Within an English classroom, literary studies provide perfect platforms for divergent questioning strategies.
For example, take the question, "If Julius Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius were all running in an election to rule your country, who would you vote for, and why?" By asking a question like this, I can see if a student has a working knowledge of the events and characters of the play and if the student can think critically through an imaginary scenario to logically draw conclusions. I even like to make the divergent essay questions on my tests open book. This emphasizes to my students that learning does not always depend on memorizing, but can use knowledge in new and meaningful ways.
2. Ask questions that propel students to analyze skeptically, not cynically.
As professionals, we know the difference between a skeptic and a cynic. In our digital age, information bombards from every angle, but not all of that information is credible or useful. A level of healthy skepticism is necessary to filter the useful and factual from everything else. This bounty of information provides teachers with a never-ending resource for training our students to question skeptically and ultimately filter information for themselves, so they can consume information actively rather than passively. Modeling is a perfect way to train students how to generate skeptical questions that can help the filtering process.
For example, when researching a controversial topic, such as abortion, teach students to ask, "What evidence is the author using to support his or her claim, and is the evidence valid?", rather than promoting cynical questioning methods that dismiss information because of a bias or differing opinion, such as, "Is the author pro-life or pro-choice?" Although the latter is a valid and important kind of question to ask when analyzing an article, it shouldn't cause one to dismiss the information immediately.
I like using these two strategies to guide my classroom questions because they are not only helping engage my students on a deeper level, but they are also encouraging students to develop positive character traits. Divergent thinkers usually consider multiple angles to any situation, and skeptical analyzers tend to pursue deeper knowledge and, ultimately, truth. Educators want to make a difference; what better way than to teach our students to ask critical questions of the world around them?
