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Educational Equity & Access: Student Formulated Text Dependent Questions as a PBL Strategy

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One Common Core strategy that can help teachers is to allow students to create text dependent questions enabling them to take ownership for their learning. According to Fisher and Frey, “Teachers should ask text-dependent questions, but students can also ask text-dependent questions of themselves and one another as they learn to read and think this way” (Fisher & Frey, 2012, p.73). This does not mean that teachers should not also ask text dependent questions,  but rather that they could give students the opportunity to struggle with the text by formulating their own text dependent questions. If this democratization of learning is allowed it will help provide educational equity and access for all students. Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana argue that student formulated questions can “serve as the catalyst for figuring things out and overcoming previously insurmountable obstacles” (Rothstein & Santana, 2011, p. 107). Both the students and the teacher could utilize these questions to diagnose student learning and to make instructional adjustments.  Isn’t this one of the functions of the new optional interim Common Core assessments?

This is the strategy that I have implemented in the classroom.  Students are given the opportunity to generate their own text dependent questions as one of the steps in Project Based Learning (PBL). The challenge has been getting students to formulate higher level text dependent questions as advocated by Fisher and Frey’s “Progression of Text-Dependent Questions” (Fisher, p. 73). To address this challenge I have utilized the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) developed by the Right Question Institute (Rothstein & Santana, 2011, p. 4). The QFT is a six-step protocol where students are given the opportunity not only to produce questions,  but also to improve, categorize, prioritize and reflect on their questions. Along this process students learn to analyze the text and support their own questions with evidence from the text. Isn’t this what the Common Core standards and assessments would like our students to be able to do? In the article, “Can Student-Driven Learning Happen Under Common Core?” Marsha Ratzel states that the common core assessments should reflect “the broad principles and effective pedagogy that the CCSS authors have envisioned” (Ratzel, 2013, p. 1). According to Ratzel, teachers will be able to provide a supporting role and students will be able to take ownership of their learning. In other words, classrooms environments will be more student-driven rather than teacher-centered or teaching solely to the test.  In his inaugural address at UCLA, Howard Gardner, who is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, stated that today’s learners are doers. If this is the case, shouldn’t teachers provide more opportunities for student-driven learning to occur in the classroom?

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Text-Dependent Questions: Effective questions about literature and nonfiction texts require students to delve into a text to find answers, Instructional Leader, 70-73.

Ratzel, Marsha (2013). Can Student-Driven Learning Happen Under Common Core? MindShift, Feb. 2013, http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/02/can-student-driven-learning-happen-under-common-core/

Rothstein, D., & Santana, L. (2011). Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions. Harvard Education Press.

 


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