Chapter 5

Pose Purposeful Questions

Reflect: 

After reading Chapter 5, please reflect on the questions below and post your response by Tuesday. Feel free to respond to any of the questions provided or share something else that you intentionally did differently in regards to posing purposeful questions.

Please note: the prompts below are to help you reflect. There is not an expectation for you to respond to all {or even any} of the provided questions!

Respond:

Option 1: 

Analyzing Your Questions for a Lesson

Teach a math lesson using a high-level task. Video or audio-record the lesson. Consider the extent to which the questions you asked -

• revealed students' current understandings; 
• probed students' decisions by asking them to explain, elaborate, or clarify their thinking; 
• made the mathematics more visible and accessible for student examination and discussion; and 
• engages students with the reasoning of each other.

Then consider the discussion from an equity perspective: 

• Did historically marginalized students have equal opportunities to answer questions that probed their mathematical decisions and made their mathematical ideas visible, accessible, and valid for examination by other students? 
• Did some students only get asked information retrieval questions? 

or Option 2: 

Posing Assessing and Advancing Questions for a Lesson

Select an upcoming lesson that uses a high-level task. Identify the mathematics learning goal and anticipate student solution paths, including both productive and unproductive ways that students might approach the task. 

• Formulate both assessing and advancing questions aligned to your goals and the anticipated solution paths to ask students as they work independently or in small groups. 
• Teach the lesson and reflect on the ways the assessing questions gave you greater insights into student thinking and how the advancing questions moved student learning forward.

Interact: 

On Tuesday, read your colleagues' reflections and respond to at least one other post by sharing a comment, insight, or interesting possibility by Friday.