Designing Questions

I think my biggest takeaway from these videos, regarding designing questions for the classroom and connecting instruction to the standards, is that both must be done with purpose in mind.  As Ms. Thomas stated in the first video, instruction must be designed with a goal in mind: What do the students need to gain from this activity or this instruction?  How am I as an educator going to guide them there?  Information and questions must be given based on the end result that we want our students to achieve.  This is demonstrated well by the scaffolding questions that Ms. Thomas describes: the first question is more about general knowledge, the second builds on the first and is more specific, and the final relates directly to the students by asking a critical thinking question.  The goal of this method of questioning is to take the information of a given text and expand it, teaching students not only to know and comprehend (displayed as the basic levels of knowledge in Bloom's Taxonomy), but also to apply and evaluate the information based on the world around them.

This also correlates with Chima Ikonne's statements in the following video, in which he essentially states that instruction must be designed to gradually remove the "training wheels" of our students, developing them to think critically but also independently.  This is reflected by the consensus among all the educators in the video that work assigned to the students must be tasks that force them to be hands-on.  This gives their work a purpose (just as our work must be purpose driven), a final goal that they strive to reach, and also allows them to work collaboratively with their peers with guidance from the educator should they need it.  However, in order for such projects to be successful, they must be assigned in order to meet the needs of that particular group of students.  In other words, the same project cannot be assigned to every class every year; one must learn to gauge each group of students and be willing to change their lesson plan in order to better help them succeed with the task given.