The Instructional Power of Questions in the ZPD of Teacher Professional Development
Reread the intro to Overscaffolding
Ms. Douglas did the textbook thing and checked in on Adrian, a student, writing her letter to Ms. Geller on her last day as a student teacher. “What are you writing about?” Ms. Douglas asked Adrian. The researcher chose carefully from a basket of euphemisms to describe her assessment of what happened next, the warm “less than idyllic,” the cool “awkward,” and finally, the hard “unproductive.” It had to be said. The scaffold ultimately failed to support learning, probably because the anchor failed.
Adrian responded: “Facts.”
Yes, the moment started to tilt toward awkward. Ms. Douglas seemed flustered based on my reading of this moment: “About what?”
This effort to rebuild an already awkward anchor is doomed, I see on reflection; her initial question shifts to interrogation. “About what?” is an amplifier, which drives joint attention more firmly toward the topic, the same stance that didn’t work. This writer is writing a personal letter, not a report. Adrian seems trapped. Suppose she were actually writing and telling Ms. Geller how Ms. Geller was the best teacher she ever had, I like Ms. Douglas but you’re the best, I wish you could be my teacher? In symmetry with the teacher’s doubling down, Adrian doubles down: “Facts.”
The means to begin making a scaffold for learning to write, a fragile and mysterious thing well-studied by Scientists, was reasonable. A question. I can imagine Miles Myers, see his blue eyes dancing and his head tilt, hear his laughter. “A perfectly reasonable thing to do,” he might say. Ever the pragmatist, he might add, “Question is—what question?”
It’s the red wheelbarrow all over again. It all depends on this one in my hands at the moment. The Moving finger writes. The tools to build a proper scaffold—in this case the mother of all tools, the question—are like those needed to build proper foot orthotics;
the best ones are made of proven material by skilled craftsmen after a careful fitting by a medical technician with experience using their eyes and their tools and a scientific fascination with the assessment of the human foot. When physical therapists who help people with foot problems in California gained access to a doctoral curriculum, it was a sign of victory for Homo sapiens in the wild.
It’s all about the body in teaching and learning, its level of fear and stress, its relaxation and comfort, its willingness to work hard, its posture and stance—of course, also what comes out of its mouth, how it presents not in ornamentation but in substance and in action. The best online learning where the mouth is on screen or in text is accomplished by those who have learned how to teach and learn with their bodies in the same room. It’s not all psychological. It’s embodiment in a racified, stratified, and unstable cultural world.
What alternative questions might be asked? Keep in mind that questions work by establishing joint attention much like the gesture of pointing to a physical object. Here we have a mental object. The anchor of the scaffold in this case grounds the upcoming talk in the topic of the letter. Adrian is writing about facts. Case closed. I strongly suspect there is more, but for now—what other questions? How might Ms. Douglas pull this one out of the fire? How is it going? How is the writing going? Are you having any problems? This set of questions anchors the scaffold in the process, not topic, and everything that followed could have been different. It still could have gone south.
The “problems” question is generically a cold question in writing instruction: yes or no. You’re not supposed to be having problems if I taught you right. But Bakhtinian heteroglossia theory tells us the word ‘problem’ like all important psychological tools has different meanings, different values, different motives in different mouths. When I taught writing as writing, especially during the fourth grade chapter, I made problem finding salient and chipped in my thoughts freely. I asked students to keep notes on problems and attempted solutions in their work portfolios. We had formal discussions and conferences. Problems I told my students are opportunities, stealing freely from Nancy Atwell, another example of heteroglossia in my ventriloquating Atwell’s words and authorial intent. So in my mouth a problem with the writing was a good thing. “I can see why it might be hard to decide on words to open this letter. Ms. Geller helped you a lot in math.”
“Are you having any problems?” in a predictable, safe setting makes it a different question. Socrates as you know was suspicious of writing as a means to learning I think because he understood heteroglossia as well as scaffolding. Nobody owns words because in a single mind they only partially exist, my yin, your yang. The so-called Socratic method goes well beyond its mythical oversimplification in the popular culture. Like Miles, Socrates would see questioning as an important tool—the question is what question. Listening to Lev, Miles, and Socrates hash out an explanation for teaching and learning would be worth the price of admission.
I really liked when Isabel Beck et al. came up with QtA, a brilliant parry to Socrates. You can question the author—just don’t expect the answer to come from the author. You have to dig for it. I experimented with it in my own teaching along with Reciprocal Reading, QAR, and Peer Think-allowed-Question (PTQ, my own unpublished concoction from a while ago). With the exception of Think Aloud, QtA and Reciprocal Reading are easily accessible to teachers and would repay local teacher-led professional development on questions as a tool to make a scaffold on the fly. I was pleased when the National Reading Panel in 2000 (I think) published its claim after a full review of scientific evidence that teaching students to ask questions (rather than answer them) is among the six or so proven strategies teachers ought use to teach comprehension. Teacher modeling of questioning as a springboard to comprehension may help more than teacher interrogation or overscaffolding.
When reading Scientists began wondering about how to measure reading comprehension back in the early days, the answer was obvious: Ask questions and find out if they can pick out the right answer from a collection of imposters. It wasn’t long before the read-for-the-right-answer strategy became not just the assessment strategy, but the teaching strategy. As Bloom must have known when he developed his powerful taxonomy, the one-right-answer question isn’t the answer. Unfortunately, it can quickly become a surface learning strategy, the vacuum cleaner model of understanding. Reading to anticipate the questions you might be asked puts considerable pressure to (con)form rather then be (in)formed or, more importantly, to think. But the real problem isn’t the type of question, right-there-right-answer vs think-and-learn. I have nothing against the right answer and wouldn’t hesitate to ask “But what does the text actually say?” It’s the subjugated habit of mind—reading is done in classrooms to answer someone else’s questions who already know the right answer. “No, you’re wrong!” is replaced with “How confident are you in your thinking? Can you defend it? I’m not going to hurt you no matter what.
I remember using a series titled Timed Readings when I taught in the reading clinic at Solano Community College in the early 1980s. Ten volumes graded in difficulty with nonfiction passages of 400 words with ten multiple-choice comprehension questions. Students could time themselves (Evelyn Woods style) but still be held accountable for comprehension. SRA Rate Builders worked the same way, except the SRA IV kits included very difficult college-level passages guaranteed to stop you in your tracks. It was very cool to be placed on the same level of uncertainty as my students and go back and forth trying to figure out how choice C could possibly be the right answer. Was it a misprint?
I was unaware of eye-movement studies at the time, so I had no reason to object to the focus on rate. Let them try to read fast. They were great exercises in my context. I found the Timed Reading exercises useful because a) they challenged students to view themselves as responsible learners (record-keeping led to reflective analysis and goal setting), b) students were interested in talking about the trade-offs between speed and understanding, a valuable trade-off to know about for novice college students, c) I taught my students never to assume the answer key was right if they had a case against it. I added never to assume that I was right. I promised them my best reasoning.
From experience I believe that questioning is among the most ubiquitous means of building a scaffold one-on-one, small-group, or whole-class during reading, literacy, or language arts instruction while simultaneously being the most difficult to master. The second slot on the ubiquity scale is probably explanation followed by hints.
Starting with questioning during writing consults among a professional development group of teachers unfamiliar with the ZPD may multiply the chances of embarrassment. My hypothesis is that it’s a high level of challenge. I’m not sure about math education where posing problems takes the place of questions at center stage. A better starting point might be explanation. When, how much, and why explanation is a proper choice of means to scaffold seems friendly—or?