Technique 32: Phrasing fundamentals - Building ratio through questioning

Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 32: Phrasing fundamentals
Building ratio through questioning

Here's how you should think about memory: it's the residue of thought, meaning that the more you think about something, the more likely it is that you'll remember it later.

—Daniel Willingham1

The term “ratio” refers to the proportion of cognitive work done by students during a lesson. This is an important thing for teachers to reflect on. Students remember what they think about, Daniel Willingham tells us. So a major goal of our teaching is to cause students—all of them, ideally—to do quite a lot of thinking about the most important content of the lesson. But of course there's a bit more to it than that. “Desirable difficulty” is what cognitive psychologists call the idea that thinking harder about something encodes it more deeply in memory and therefore makes it easier to remember—and probably encodes more things of substance in the first place, as well.

We could represent the concept of ratio graphically like this:

Graph depicts the ratio spectrum. The horizontal and vertical axes are represented in 100 percent.

Understanding this diagram requires defining two terms for describing student thinking during the lesson. The first is Participation Ratio (PR). I've put this on the x axis. It asks the question of who participates and how often. If I ask a question and everyone in my classroom answers in their heads or picks up their pencil and starts writing out thoughts, my Participation Ratio is high. Everyone in the class is answering my question. If it's a discussion and everyone is listening carefully to the speaker my Participation Ratio is high. Potentially it's higher still if I occasionally divide my whole group discussion up into pair discussions (Turn and Talks); suddenly more people are participating. My PR is high.

If I was measuring my Participation Ratio, though, I'd have to measure it over the course of the whole lesson. A minute or two of full participation isn't nearly as good as everyone engaged and participating all class long.

One easy way to get a high Participation Ratio might be to do a lot of Call and Response. Students love it—at least younger ones—and I can see that everyone is answering my questions. If I add six and six what do I get … class?!

The problem of course is that while adding six and six is helpful to a degree, there's not much “desirable difficulty.” My questioning isn't going to be rigorous enough to ensure deep understanding of the math. To do that I've got to ask harder questions about harder things. Students have to strain a little. The rigor of student thinking I could call Think Ratio (TR) and put it on my y axis.2

I could boost my Think Ratio even more if my students thought deeply about substantive questions in a variety of ways. Writing, for example, is especially rigorous. Writing and then listening to how others thought about the same question might be even more challenging, with unexpected ideas suggested by others to wrestle with and reconcile with my own thoughts. At least that would happen if I were a good listener. If I had to rewrite my initial idea based on what I'd heard in the discussion and then explain my changes to a partner, my thinking could have even greater depth and variety.

If that happened and it happened steadily throughout class, I might plot my class overall at point 1 on the Ratio Spectrum above. My Think Ratio would be high throughout and so would my Participation Ratio.

This would be better than my Call and Response lesson with math facts, which would land around point 3: high Participation Ratio but low Think Ratio.

If I instead dusted off my deepest questions about the nature of math and had a profound discussion about it with the two or three most engaged students in class, I might check in at point 4, high Think Ratio, low Participation Ratio.

Sadly it would be easier than I might think to get down to point 2: low PR, low TR. I could get there via a banal lesson plan yielding boring questions and bored students. But just as likely I could get there with a promising lesson and lack of attention to teaching technique. For example, if I allowed students to call out answers to questions, and the two or three most verbal students in my class proceeded to call out the first answer they could think of to each question, I would very quickly get to point 2. Even my two or three answerers weren't thinking very hard and everyone else would have long since realized they weren't answering and would be elsewhere, mentally. In that case I could be asking the most brilliant questions in the world. Two or three people answering them with half thought-out ideas is enough to render my perfect questions irrelevant.

The following three chapters are about increasing student understanding and knowledge—not to mention motivation and engagement—by taking three paths to point 1.

In Chapter Seven we'll address how questioning skills can increase PR and TR. For example, if I can use Means of Participation to signal to my three highly verbal students that I'd like them to raise their hands unless otherwise indicated, I can suddenly slow things down and cause them to think more deeply about my questions. “Perhaps your first answer is not the best …” I say, and they stop to reconsider. Over time I teach them to think slowly and deeply. If I then begin Cold Calling, I can cause more students to share answers (even those who don’t at first volunteer readily) and even more students than that to answer in their heads in preparation of the fact that they might just get called on. Suddenly we are moving up and to the right on the graph.

In Chapter Eight, we'll address how writing can boost the ratio. If I pose my question and ask everyone to write out some initial thoughts, I suddenly have thirty students answering a question I might previously have had just one or two students answer. I have multiplied my PR but also my TR. Students have to choose precise coordinated syntax and verbiage to write out an idea, especially if, again, I can get them to work more slowly and deliberately at times. Or to rewrite for precision, even. Writing is inherently harder than talking. Again we are suddenly sailing upward and rightward.

In Chapter Nine we'll address discussion and how it can help boost ratio. There's a bit of a golden ticket in this chapter, a hidden gem that not everyone recognizes the value of. It's the realization that the ratio during a discussion—and indeed the quality of the discussion more broadly—is shaped at least as much, or even more, by the degree and quality of listening as it is by the degree and quality of talking. We live in a world where sometimes we're all talking (or shouting), and no one is listening (unless shouting back counts). Our classrooms are better if they are the antidote to such a world. So perhaps a better title for Chapter Nine is Ratio Through Discussion and Listening.

Before we get to these topics, there's one additional factor to consider: the knowledge prerequisite. To quote Daniel Willingham once more:

Data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable. Thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem-solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).

The tools in the ratio toolbox are wonderful, but they work only if they are employed in knowledge-rich (and knowledge-enriched) settings. That is: where students know a lot about the topics you ask them to think about because you've taught them. If you want a high Think Ratio you must have facts. Yes, “mere facts.” (I'm pausing here while a pall descends over some of my readership.) Students must have facts to use, apply, consider, connect, and reflect on. Of course, the facts are even better if they're connected in a deep and organized body of knowledge, the fancy name for which is schema.3 In a knowledge-rich environment, though, even “disconnected facts,” that straw man of futurist educators the world over, don't stay disconnected for long.4 Soon enough, students will see connections among the things they know and their facts will no longer be disconnected—doubly so if we place them in situations that make it more likely for them to connect the pieces of knowledge they hold.

I share this because the power of knowledge is one of the most misunderstood things in education. You've heard those self-same futurists and their acolytes in TED Talks and out on social media telling us that facts are irrelevant because you can look anything up on Google, but this is not, in fact, true. To use knowledge in critical thinking it has to be in your long-term memory. What we call insight or even creativity is often actually a bit of knowledge from long-term memory popping up in the moment we learn about something else and announcing a previously not-obvious connection.5 But even beyond that, the “just Google it” theory doesn't work because you're unlikely to know there's a connection between something you don't know about and what you're reading or learning about, so you're unlikely to think to look it up.6 And even if you did, you'd have to hold it in your short-term memory once you looked it up, and this would leave you less working memory for creative leaps.

Bloom's Taxonomy, at least when presented as a pyramid, is a typical point of confusion. Educators often presume that knowledge and facts being at the bottom of the pyramid means they're the least important part. Many followers of Bloom on the other hand insist that he understood the profound importance of knowledge and meant to imply that the whole thing rested on a foundation of knowledge because it was so important. That's relieving to hear but doesn't change the fact that many (most?) educators don't think about it that way. If you've got a pyramid, every teacher glances at it and wants to guide his or her students to the top: We're all in synthesis, all the time in this classroom. Sadly, cognitive science tells us that this is wrong. It's actually the lowly facts that work like fuel and get the whole cognitive motor humming.

Building Ratio Through Questioning

Teachers love to ask questions. Rightly. Questions can cause students to think deeply about content, and what students think about is what they are likely to learn and remember.7 And of course questions can spark discussion and peer-to-peer learning.

But can and do are different things. We have all been inspired by profound questions but we have all also seen, and many of us (myself included) have taught lessons where questions, once asked, hang unanswered in the air. Or generate a smattering of half-hearted and obligatory responses: the same few students (or student) calling out the first thought off the top of their heads.

Just because we ask questions doesn’t mean students answer them, in other words—or think much about them. So it’s worth using a few tools to refine questioning and ensure that it supports strong Participation and Think Ratios. As a starting point, let's differentiate two different reactions that students may have to questions, both of which can be valuable in the classroom.

First, there is thinking. Ideally everyone in a given class would think rigorously about every question you ask and attempt to answer it in their minds. This is a different activity from answering the question and sharing their thinking aloud. Answering and thinking are separate variables.

A coordinate system depicting the zone of desired student behaviors.

That might seem like an arcane point to make, but to be the teachers our students deserve, we need to reliably cause both to occur. Imagine you're the teacher and I am your student. When you ask a question, I think deeply about my response and also share slivers of my insights with the group. All my classmates do the same. That's the ideal, but it doesn't come about easily. I might barely think about a question and reflexively answer off the top of my head. I'd be answering, but you would have failed to elicit much thinking. Or I could think deeply but never share those private thoughts, leaving you and all my classmates to guess to what degree I was engaged in and learning about the class content. Then you'd have thinking but not answering. And of course, I could neither think about nor answer the question. I could sit and engage in flights of my own fancy while class went on around me.

In fact, the degree of thinking I do and the degree of my intent to answer are correlated; norms of answering shape norms of thinking. I am less likely to think fully about your questions if I know I am unlikely to share my thinking with others. On the other hand, if answering fully and well is the social norm in the classroom—that is, most of my classmates answer frequently and with full effort, so I think that's the natural thing to do—I am more likely to persist in doing the hard work of thinking because I want to be able to answer too.

Perhaps a few students will persist in the most rigorous inquiry when left to their own accord and self-discipline but most (myself included!8) require the possibility of having to share their answer to sustain and encourage their best thinking. So unless we manage the process of who answers, when and how, we are far less likely to cause the greatest amount of thinking to occur among the widest range of students.

I am aware that I have not said anything about the content of questions yet and that may concern some readers. Needless to say, the quality of your question matters deeply. Among other benefits, a good question creates a strong incentive (or disincentive) to answer. It is also true, though, that if questions engage only a narrow group of students or only engage them half-heartedly, the quality of the question doesn't matter much. You can ask the most profound question in the world; if only one or two students think about it deeply with the expectation that they might answer, it's all for naught. If we want to improve questioning, it's necessary to first address the culture and context in which questions are asked.

Thus the techniques in this chapter include Wait Time (how to build “thinking habits” in the moments after a question is asked and before answers are given) and Cold Call (which among other things ensures that all students feel that they might be called on to answer and therefore engage fully in thinking about questions). I'll also discuss Call and Response, which can help build norms of engaged participation, and Means of Participation, which is a reflection on the overlooked step of communicating to students how you will ask them to answer questions. Finally, I will discuss Break It Down, the process of using additional questions to help students when they are stuck.

Basic Guidance for Question Writing

Of course how you craft your questions matters, so before going deeper into these techniques for building ratio through questioning, I'm going to share notes on writing better questions that focus on two things: preparation and purpose.

1. Preparation: It is difficult to think of a great question in the midst of teaching. You need your working memory elsewhere. Either your question or something else will likely suffer if you try to think of the perfect way to unlock the irony of Jane Austen's prose in the moment your students are reading it. Whenever possible, plan and write your questions out in advance—either the exact ones you will ask or key questions you might ask. Even a first draft helps. If you change it in the midst of the lesson that’s a good thing: that a second draft improves on a first draft does not mitigate the value of the earlier draft.

2. Purpose: The purpose is not to ask questions; the purpose is to use questions to elicit different types of thinking. A question is a means to an end, so if your goal is to use questioning in a lesson, it's necessary to take the next step: use it for what?

If the end purpose is to use thinking to elicit different types of thinking, it's worth noting that we often fall into unconscious habits—consistently asking the same types of questions—and thus elicit the same types of thinking, perhaps overlooking opportunities for different types of questions that elicit different types of thinking. Categorizing questions by the type of thinking they seek to foster is an imperfect endeavor at best, but it can help to push us outside our familiar habits and ways. With that in mind, here are five purposes for questions:

1. Discovery: Some questions are intended to cause students to discover or derive a new idea. I could ask you questions designed to make you realize that an author is talking about something that the reader knows but the main character doesn't. When you explain that this is happening, I tell you it's called “dramatic irony.”

2. Application: Just as rigorous—sometimes more so—is to start with the idea and ask students to apply or explain its application. I tell you that “dramatic irony” is when the reader knows something the main character doesn't and then ask, “Why is the author using dramatic irony here?” or “How is it different from the last time she used it?”

3. Check for understanding: There are also check for understanding questions, which are retrospective: “Why did we say the author was using dramatic irony? Where was the dramatic irony in yesterday's reading?”

4. Retrieval practice: We use Retrieval Practice questions to encode ideas in students' long-term memory. such as “Please define dramatic irony for me, Charles.”

5. Perception-based questions: Perception-based questions ask students to describe what they notice. These are crucial but underrated. Perception is the first step in understanding, and when describing what they see, students must prioritize what they think is most important. When you ask, “What do you notice about Emma’s language in this passage, Charles?” He may tell you a lot of things but also reveal that he has missed a phrase of crucial irony. Or perhaps he has seen it. Until he can observe the key phenomena for himself he is not fully autonomous.

Using Perception-Based Questions: What Differences Do You See?

Sensitivity Analysis is a close reading tool my colleagues and I describe in Reading Reconsidered Curriculum in which the teacher presents a sentence from a text to students and asks them to compare it to a similar version they've created with one or two small changes.

The idea is for students to analyze the impact of word choice or syntax by comparing subtly different examples. The key is in the subtlety of the differences. Research in comparative judgment suggests this is an especially effective way to unlock understanding of nuance and complexity. Students perceive a slight difference in tone or mood and so develop an ear for language.

In testing out lesson plans for the Reading Reconsidered Curriculum we developed, I volunteered to teach a lesson on the novel Esperanza Rising that included a sensitivity analysis question, and I struggled badly.

The sentence in question described the protagonist's experience in a dust storm.

The original was:

“Thousands of acres of tilled soil were becoming food for la tormenta and the sky was turning into a brown swirling fog.”

The alternative was:

“Thousands of acres of tilled soil were blown into the air and the sky was turning into a brown swirling fog.”

Students jumped in gamely. The idea was to help students see the impact of personification—that it made the storm seem alive, like a monster perhaps, but students' responses were vague. “The original was more descriptive,” one student opined. “It made you feel things more,” said another. They struggled to look carefully at the differences in word choice and I struggled to help them. We were fumbling around as if in a dust storm ourselves.

Afterwards, Colleen Driggs, who'd been observing, advised: “Focus on perception first. Ask them to start by observing the differences they see between the two sentences. Then ask them to analyze.”

This was simple but brilliant. My first question should have simply been: “What differences do you see between the two sentences?” This would have caused students to describe (and see) the changes first and then think about their impacts. I needed to start by making sure they saw the difference and then ask why it mattered. Understanding almost always starts with perception … for me, as well as my students.

Colleen caused me to see the opportunity in shifting to perception-based questions. I'd been asking application and discovery questions. By helping me to see how a perception question was different, she allowed me to then think about how to use it. In part that's why I suggest occasionally asking yourself, “What kind of question did I use there? What was its purpose? Might I have used a different type of question?”

Technique 32: Phrasing fundamentals

How we ask a question can help ensure that it is worth trying to answer from the perspective of the listener; the question's structure can have a significant influence on the degree of thinking and answering it inspires. Understanding a few “phrasing fundamentals” can help make sure your questions engage your students as you'd hope they would.

The Obvious Trap

One reason students don't answer or think about questions is because they don't seem worth answering, often because they are either rhetorical—the teacher doesn't really expect an answer—or, worse, so obvious that they seem rhetorical. You might call this the obvious trap. Questions with obvious answers are killers of intellectual culture because they pretend to ask a question when there's really no question. Why are you asking me that? students think. If you're often asked meaningless questions, you become skeptical of the questioner. Students become reluctant to answer under those circumstances. When everyone clearly knows the answer, the person who gives that answer aloud appears to be a fool: oblivious and overeager. Sometimes we seek to start a discussion with an “easy” question, for example, but because the answer seems so obvious, participants are reluctant to answer, perhaps thinking they've missed something or that it was actually a trick question. The effect is the opposite of the intent. We kill the culture from the outset. In the long run, too. Over time, asking questions with obvious answers undercuts the credibility of your questioning more broadly.

Yes/no questions and questions with just two possible answers are especially vulnerable to the obvious trap. And, obvious or not, they often reduce the quality of the learning environment because one-word answers are the natural response.

Consider a science teacher who asks, during a lab, “Should we add our solution now or wait till it cools?”

I haven't provided enough context to indicate whether the solution should be added now but I'd wager the answer is pretty likely that we should wait. Would you stop a lesson to ask, “Should we add the solution now or wait till it cools?” if the answer was that you should add the solution now? Unlikely. You'd just say, “Now we add our solution.” Or would you ask “What should we do now?” The answer is obvious and students are likely to perceive the question as rhetorical or think, Why are you asking us?

One reason this may happen is because a teacher is trying to ask a question when she really just wants to explain something: “It's important to remember that we should wait for the solution to cool.” Or even: “It's important to remember that we should wait for the solution to cool. Why?” It's OK to tell people things directly. Appearing to ask a question when you want to tell students something wastes time and builds a culture where questions don't feel engaging and authentic. It's hard to build intellectual engagement from that kind of experience.

The questions “Should I add the solution now?” and “Should I add the solution now or wait till it cools?” are also uninspiring because they are binary. There are two possible answers in each case. “Yes” or “no” in the first question and “now” or “later” in the second. “What should I do now?” would be more interesting. “What should I look for now?”—a perception-based question for which the answer might be “the temperature”—would be better. Or “What's happening now?” which, assuming you can't see anything happening at the moment, might have more of a retrospective focus and allow you to check for understanding of previously taught content. These questions are all more interesting because there are more than two possible answers. Simply making the question nonbinary helps.

Binary questions are also problematic because they are especially prone to “tipping,” which occurs when the questioner adds voice inflection on a word or phrase to suggest the answer. A bit of emphasis on “now” or perhaps on the “let it cool”—“Should we add the solution now? Or let it cool?”—makes answering doubly redundant. Your questions could be about bocce, something I know exactly nothing about, and given a binary question with a bit of voice inflection to tip me off, I'm getting ten out of ten correct answers.

Avoid Bait and Switch

Another way questions can go wrong is because you ask a question, give students time to think about it, and then call on them to answer a different question, or a question you rephrase in a way that changes its meaning. “How is Jonas changing in this chapter? Turn and talk with your partner for ninety seconds,” you say. But after the Turn and Talk you say, “Great. Where and how do we see Jonas's anxiety showing up?” The eager student who put her hand up thinking she'd be asked the original question is caught out. She showed her enthusiasm and now may quite publicly struggle to answer. It's bait and switch and it makes it less likely that she'll keep raising her hand as confidently or as often.

Most of the time, bait and switch happens because we haven't prepared. If you think up your question in the moment, you will have to keep it in your working memory while you listen to student responses, manage the classroom, think about the content, and so on. Under these conditions it's easy to forget your own question—or to remember only the general idea. It's one more reason to plan (and write down) your key questions in advance.9 If you do use questions that are thought up in the moment, write them on the board when you can. The visual will help students remain disciplined to answer what you asked, and it will also help you to remember the original question.