Enabling Questions for Self-Directed Inquiry Training

Enabling Questions (EQ) For Active Student-Centered Inquiry & Verbal Learning*
EQs are interrupting questions that stir creative outcomes
•
*Abridged with author permission: Manzo/Manzo/Thomas (2009) Content Area Literacy: A Framework for Reading-Based Instruction (5th edition) Wiley Publishers

The Enabling Questions (EQ) procedure is a student-centered gambit designed to provide experience and Self-Instruction for students in the value and empowerment that comes from learning how to use various inquiry strategies in conventional verbal learning (Manzo/Manzo, 1990). EQ is initiated and demonstrated in a highly structured way with a prepared set of questions that students can be used to tune into and reduce distraction during Lecture-Discussion, still the most frequently used form of instruction. Using Enabling Questions puts the listener into an active, engaged thinking mode and invites the teacher or speaker to talk a little less and a little more pointedly in response student-relevant questions and concerns. Students should be urged to translate the model questions ahead into their own words and to practice using these each day and in each class. EQ is a powerful social tool that illustrates how to be assertive without being rude or aggressive. It can be a very inviting substitution for maladaptive behavior in disruptive classrooms. Disruptive students will use these questions rather disruptively. The teacher would be wise to focus on the questions raised and in so doing illustrate to students the value and reasonable control that they can exercise over a lesson. The inversion of student-centered questions for teacher-centered questions seems to be its own reward. The sum of student comments suggests that this kind of give and take makes them feel like they are part of something constructive.

Suggested Enabling Question Types
Set 1: Questions that Help the Listener Organize and Clarify Information
• What is/are the main question(s) you are answering by your lecture (or lesson) today?
• Which key terms and concepts are most important for us to remember from what you have said (or will say) today?
• What is most often misunderstood or confusing about the information or position you are presenting today?
Set 2: Questions that Help the Listener Get a Mental Breather
• Could you please restate that last point in some other words?
• Would you please spell ____ and ____ for us?
• Would you please say which points you especially want us to note at
this time?
Set 3: Questions that Invite Give-and-Take with the Speaker
• How does what you have said compare with positions others have taken, and who might these others be?
• Is there convincing evidence to support your position that you can share with us?
• What do you think is the weakest part of the position you have taken?
• How do you think this position (or new information) affects previously held beliefs?
• What do you suppose would happen if you extended this point another step or two?
• Would you mind pausing for a moment to see if there are other views on this in the class/audience? This would help us better understand and follow your points.
Any one of the latter sets of questions likely would put the listener back into an active and engaged thinking mode and reduce the sometimes excessive dominance of the speaker. It is important that the listener who wishes to use these types of questions does so with an eye toward using them for enriching comprehension, learning, and mature interaction, and not as a counteroffensive. One way to help students learn the value and become regular users of Enabling Questions is to write these questions on index cards and distribute a few to each class member. Then urge students to try to use the questions on their card(s) intelligently over a two- to three-day period. Schedule a day to discuss what happened and what students learned and what might need to be modified to make the Enabling Questions even more enabling. This “metacognitive”- or thinking about thinking - step also helps to convert rather rigid Inquiry skill training into self-directed flexible Inquiry Strategy Learning.

To see more teaching methods for Professional Teachers, and advancing Professional Education go to: http://teacherprofessoraccountability.ning.com/main/invitation/new?xg_source=msg_wel_network And…http://bestmethodsofinstruction.com/ Or our newest site for Professional Teachers: http://anthony-manzo.blogspot.com/2010/05/race-to-top-accountability-leaves.html

Translation Questions: The Missing Link in Power Questioning

Translation Questions - A Transcendent & Under-Utilized Probative
A translation question typically requires that a student be able to re-represent something presented in one symbolic form in another, or alternate form. This might be a charge to re-state in one’s own words what another student has said, or something written found in text. Translation involves taking one’s ideas, which themselves may be incomplete, and beginning the public process of converting them to a clear communicable form. It could be a charge to convert a picture into descriptive words, or the inverse. Translation of inchoate notions into apprehendible words is one of the most challenging aspects of effective writing. At a “clinical” level, a translation question is a form of diagnostic-teaching and instructional conversation that seamlessly causes a rotation of those who are speaking to the many others who tend to lapse into passivity. Judging by its inherent value it could be easier to grasp, than apparently it is to execute.
There are several studies that have incidentally provided some insight into the typical level of usage by teachers of translation questions. Guszak (1967) found teachers using them less than 9% of the time in a conventional classroom setting. Manzo (1969) found a dramatic difference in utilization in a remedial/clinical setting where those using the Directed Reading Activity (Betts, 1957) – about 1% translation questions, or the ReQuest Procedure- about 9% translation questions (Manzo, 1969a). So, it seems that the teaching approach being used makes a difference in inclination to utilize this question type. One of the goals of the present re-awaking process is to detail more and better ways to promote the fruitful raising of translation questions, by teachers, and ideally, by students of the teacher and of one another.
Adding the Translation Ingredient
There are any number of ways to foster translation questioning. For example, the tutor might say, “Can you tell me in your own words what this phrase, or these words, mean in this sentence ?” (Pointing to, or even reading aloud, the words “Ellen left one of her lives behind…”). Or, “What do you suppose that picture says/illustrates?” Or, if ReQuest is being conducted in a group situation, the classroom teacher might say: “Who can say Trish’s remark to ‘lives behind’ in another way?”
A second way to build the translation question gambit into oral language interactions is to make a personal commitment to ask essentially the same question as previously stated – (“say what someone else has said in other words”)- at least twice in every period of classroom discussion and comprehension checking. This should have the effect of creating a comfortable repetition of a key point or bit of information without taking on the character of drill, and while encouraging greater attention to the discussion; if students begin to anticipate that they might be asked to translate, they are more likely to shift into a more active and possibly interactive mode. Students tend, as do we all when listening, to function in a quasi-passive mode, expecting the speaker to repeat, underscore and even tell us when something is sufficiently important that we should write it down.
Establishing even a leitmotif of translation questions as part of one’s repertoire also provides a rather seamless way to support students with enrich limited language proficiency, as well as those with other language related and/or attention deficit problems. Importantly, this same essential pattern of questioning can be conducted at a pre-reading stage with pictures, where children are asked to simply tell what they see –translate the picture into words – and, along the way to have them re-translate what was said by a prior student as a means of having them listen carefully and learn acceptable (peer) language and poise from one another.
Another natural way to encourage self and students to engage the translation question more fully is to analyze proverbs and idioms, which naturally tend to say one thing at a simple, or literal level and another at a more abstract level (Manzo, 1981). Having a new proverb on the board each week in class or on a class website, with almost no other attention to it until Friday, has proven to be remarkably effective in promoting experience rich discussion, and abstract verbal reasoning (Manzo & Manzo, 1987).
When translation questions are asked, the positive impact on relevance and attention during aural-oral exchanges in a classroom increase palpably. It is difficult to imagine anything that could be done, at any price, that could have as powerful an effect on day-to-day teaching and learning as increasing the proportion of translation questions.
Quest Forward
The ingredients described above resemble the Universal Strategies in Content Area Reading that we first articulated sometime ago, and have refined more recently (Manzo, 1985 ; Manzo, Manzo & Thomas, in press). It also was with these ingredients in mind that we developed the Informal Reading-Thinking Inventory (Manzo, Manzo and McKenna, 1995). Built on a familiar frame, this Informal Reading Inventory is designed to simultaneously assess reading of, between, and beyond the lines, as well as several other crucial aspects of cognitive development.
IN: Instructional Ingredients: Educational Chefs Share Tricks of the Trade
Anthony Manzo & Ula Manzo
California State University-Fullerton
Avmanzo@aol.com & Umanzo@fullerton.edu
In:
Thinking Classrooms (Russian Languag(Journal of the International Reading Association),5,3(July, 2004) pp34-40
And: Manzo, A., Manzo, U. & Albee, J ( 2004). Reading Assessment for Diagnostic-Prescriptive Teaching (2nd) Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing