I am a professional teacher evaluator and for the past 15 years I've been travelling throughout the United States and China trying to answer the not-so-easy question of how do we make our teachers better and on a series of recent school visits here in China school leaders asked me how their teachers could further creative thinking and creativity in their classes they wanted to address the claim that their students were mostly Road learners and that's the claim goes that beyond the memorization effects in figures their students really didn't have the opportunity to put this knowledge to use
outside of the classroom now they've heard that in the West their Western counterparts have smaller classes maybe there is more opportunities for group interaction and students there have an opportunity to pursue topics that are of genuine interest to them and so school leaders are now looking for ways to inject new teaching methodologies into the Chinese classroom and as a teacher evaluator there are certain things that I look for whenever I observe a class one thing that I look for in particular are the types of questions that teachers ask questions our way of bringing the textbook
material to life they're a way of directly engaging the students and making sure that the students stay on task they're also a way to check for understanding to make sure that the students are actually absorbing what they're supposed to be learning but not all questions are created equally take a look at this pair of questions here the first one question a reads do you know what climate change is and the second one question B reads what are three causes of climate change now which one of these questions better assesses student learning if you said B
you're right question B requires you to possess a specific type of knowledge in order to answer this question either you have this information or you don't and so let's go ahead and this time we'll add another question into the mix take a look at question C why do some claim that climate change is the biggest crisis facing this generation now which one of these better assesses student learning well this question may be a little more difficult in the previous one because they both can and so the former assesses student knowledge while the latter gives students
an opportunity to think of the consequences of an impending disaster and so in the ideal class students would first ask or teachers rather would first ask question B to establish the foundation knowledge and then they would ask question C to give students an opportunity to use this knowledge now think back to when you guys were in school and I know for many of us this may be a difficult painful experience but think for a second if your teacher only asked you questions like a question B well this might be great for you know trivia contests
but we would never get an opportunity to use or put this knowledge to good use and think about for a second if your teacher only asked you questions like question C and these are pretty difficult questions this might serve to frustrate your learning and maybe you'd be tempted to give up before you even get started now back to the observations I went on these teacher observations recently and we saw different classes but I noticed that there was something in particular that was lacking and while the teachers were certainly well prepared and there was a lot
of engagement going on in the classes in overwhelming 90% of the questions that were asked were of lower order question types in other words they looked more like question B and in three of those classes not one single higher order question was even asked and so how does this even happen while asking higher order questions is the key to stimulating critical thinking and we need to be able to give students an opportunity to grapple with questions that don't necessarily have one correct answer this is more realistic of the types of situations that they're likely to
face when they get outside of the classroom now teachers shouldn't have to bear the responsibility on their own when it comes to something as important as critical thinking then it's all of our collective responsibility in order to push students forward in other words when it comes to creativity the door doesn't just shut when the school day ends and as the parent of school children myself it got me thinking about the following question how can we better support critical thinking and creativity in schools by asking better deeper questions outside of them now as we know we
can study easier questions we can answer easier questions and this is great for exams but as participants in society we all know that we have to deal with questions that are a lot more complicated than those found on a multiple-choice test in reality right and we can see here real life is a bunch of squiggles there is not necessarily a blueprint that tells us how to get from A to B and so with this type of situation it's important that we expose our students to a degree of uncertainty in their classes and not just wait
until they have to experience it for themselves for the first time outside of the classroom you know these days we send our kids to piano practice at age 4 maybe soccer practice at each 5 maybe they learn English at 3 months I don't know it's getting earlier and earlier these days but one of the reasons why we do this is to give students an opportunity to learn some subjects or to be exposed to things that they normally wouldn't be able to do outside of the classroom so when it's something as important as critical thinking at
stake does it not also make sense to expose our students to these tougher questions earlier when the stakes are not as high now when we ask tougher questions such as why questions it's a lot more difficult and it's difficult for a number of different reasons and one reason it tends to be difficult is that in answering a wide question the students need to put themselves out there there's a risk there there's a risk that well maybe they they feel they won't say the right thing or maybe they'll be judged by their classmates but we need
to do a better job of encouraging this and instilling in our students the grit necessary to be able to persevere against challenging topics that come their way and so what schools need to then do a better job of because we assume to a certain degree that in school students are able to connect the dots for themselves in other words we assume that they can take whatever knowledge that they learn in school and somehow be able to figure out how to use it outside of it but this assumption is dead wrong and in fact stew schools
need to do a better job of not just teaching students the what or the contents but getting them to how by asking more wise and luckily the we all can play a role in this in fact we can ask better questions by inviting others to ask better questions of us and here are three ways in which you can do that so let's go ahead and start with number one we can first start with a what question but don't end there remember when we ask a what question this is the starting point and when we ask
these types of questions in class students get a little bit excited because it's one of these answers where if you get it you get it and if you don't you don't but let's take a question that we started out with earlier and it's this one what are three main closet or causes rather of climate change and so if I were to ask this to my students students could easily find the answer by doing a quick search on the internet or maybe they would review their class notes but the point is it would take little effort
to answer this type of question but asking this type of question is deceptive because if you get enough of these right it could give you this false sense of security like oh I know the answer right but as we know our jobs in all of this is to move beyond the textbooks because this is what the textbooks are for and our job is to put some kind of real world spin on the type of content that students are learning in school so there's a way to make this kind of question a little more productive rather
than just asking students the one what we could do instead is have them explain or paraphrase what they word in class what they learned in class and so consider the transformation we changed what are three causes of climate change to explain what the three main causes of climate change are and here by asking this question instead students need to give a little bit more in other words it's not just a safe answer they have to go ahead and take that risk and put themselves out there so once we've established the what then we can start
making connections by asking a series of y questions and so asking these why questions gives students an opportunity to connect whatever knowledge they have to something personal in their lives and so here are just some examples of possible Y questions that students can ask well why is climate change important for me someone who lives here in Guangzhou why should i as a student be concerned about this now and not later and why is this relevant and when students make information or you know abstract information from textbooks relevant then they can see the value in this
and they start asking themselves okay how can I take this information and put it in my sphere of influence and to think about how this could be useful in my everyday of life so once we've established the what and then we figured out how to connect it with the Y then we can start the fun stuff right trying to solve by asking the house and here's some of my favorite how questions that I like to ask the first one is how do you know so in our earlier question about climate change rather than just giving
the answers students then have to back up their answers so what are the three main causes of climate change blah blah blah and then you can ask well how do you know this and by asking this question the students then cannot just get away with the easy answer in other words they have to provide some sort of evidence and to be able to defend their answer against some logical attack the second question how might your perspective be different from that of others and this forces students to empathize with others for example if they're in some
kind of debate or something then this gives students an opportunity to evaluate the grounds of the other side and to consider their needs and maybe to find some common ground and the final question is how can you solve this problem and of course this is kind of the the queen-mother of all questions it's huge right but in doing so students to synthesize all of their previous knowledge and be able to figure out how to make this their own and to be able to apply themselves and by taking this huge question and boiling it down into
manageable parts this is a valiant valuable part of the process now what's the take away from all of this well for you students who are listening to this this is an opportunity for you to extend your learning past the exams it's an opportunity that will serve you well well into the future in other words you're not just asking quite answering questions for questions eggs you're doing it in order to prepare yourselves for the types of uncertainties that you're likely to face if you're a parent listening to this asking better questions is a great way to
help your students to review by them having to explain contents that maybe they're not as or maybe that you're not as familiar with they then have to think about how they're going to put this into sort of digestible pieces for you to be able to understand it and it's a great way to be able to consolidate learning if you're a teacher listening to this think about how you could further integrate higher-order questions into your classes and if efficiency is one of the reasons why you're not asking enough higher-order questions then evaluate the sort of activities
you do with your students in class and if they don't go toward the goal of advancing critical thinking and creativity then think about whether or not these activities are truly relevant and if you're a lifelong learner ask yourself these questions in order to test your assumptions about what you think you already know at the very least you'll be able to empathize with the other side and to possibly find some common ground now you know it's it's naive for us to think and for me to stand up here and to say that you know just by
asking if more how questions or a few more why questions that this is going to be enough to create the next generation of great innovators and critical thinkers after all it takes a kind of group effort one in which schools collaborate with teachers and students and parents to create an environment where risk is rewarded and there's no fear of getting an answer wrong but in schools today we tend to reward the right answers and to penalize the wrong ones and as dr. Ken Robinson and other educators have noted our schools are in danger of falling
hopelessly out of date in preparing our students for the challenges that come along with the mid 21st century and so if risk is something that we hope to promote among our students then it's only fair that we allow our teachers to be able to take these risks and well as well and by giving them a place to ask Moorehouse and more wise this models the very type of critical thinking that we hope to instill in our students so if we can all improve and support critical thinking by asking a few extra questions each day then
maybe the most appropriate question we should be asking ourselves is why not thank you very much [Music] you
