Questioning

What I did:

I decided to web my questions in a clustering format. I wrote them down at first on paper. I came up with some questions initially. I felt frustrated because I felt like I didn’t have enough ideas. I guess I just figured that the questions I had would come easily to me since I knew a little bit about what I wanted out of this topic. Here are the questions that I came up with:
· What is good nutrition?
· How do I develop a healthy eating plan for life?
· Why do you gain/loose weight?
· Why do some people not have to worry about it?
· How do diets reflect the food pyramid?
· What does the pyramid actually look like?

Since I jumped to the conclusion immediately that this was not working, I jumped into ThinkTank.com. I really liked the idea of that web tool. What I discovered was that my topic did not fit into their preselected topics (believe it or not, as I think their overarching topics are very broad). I tried to make it work as a “system” and a “philosophy,” but the questions to choose from were too much of a stretch for nutrition. I proceeded on because I wanted to see what would happen after selecting some initial questions. I used the “system” topic and developed these questions: What are the parts of the system? What do they look like?; What are the most critical parts of the system? Why do you think these are more critical than others? Then I found the prompt section, and I fell in love with ThinkTank! The prompts that they provided, even when they are just one or two words, really helped me develop more questions for myself. In fact, I think I developed more questions using the prompts at ThinkTank than when thinking on my own. Here are the questions that I developed:
· Why might it be difficult to keep up good nutrition?
· How many different kinds of plans are there to follow good nutrition?
· Who has developed good nutrition plans?
· How do you determine portion size?
· How do you read a food label and determine nutritional content? What are you looking for?
· When is the best time to snack?
· When might I fail?

I felt like I was getting somewhere. Plus, the more I thought about it, the more questions I came up with (make sure to mention what I learned about questioning over time). Here are the questions that I added after thinking about it for a while (They actually came to me when I was driving, or at other times when my mind was wondering):
· How much water should I drink a day?
· For my body, what should I be doing?
· What is the difference between Nutrition and the Atkins diet?
· Are other people thinking about it like me?
· What is the correlation with good nutrition/eating and exercise?

After writing these questions down, I realized I had a lot of lines and circles connecting to one idea, nutrition, but none of them individually connected to any other thing. I didn’t really know how to make these connect to each other because it was lacking focus. I continued on by trying to make a web in Word, thinking that I could try harder to connect them there. The reason why I didn’t complete my web in Inspiration is that I didn’t have it at home and there would be no way for me to continue to work on it without the Inspiration software. While creating a flowchart in Word, I realized that it was a chore, more trouble than it was worth, and plain and simple, it just wasn’t working. Therefore, since they weren’t connected anyways, I just typed my questions into a list format.

What I learned:

Brainstorming questions vs. finding focus:
I immediately started to web my questions because that was what I had been reading about and just thought it was the way to do it. It ended up being rather frustrating to me because my webbing in fact wasn’t the easiest way to do it, in this case, or it wasn’t the easiest way for me. By typing it as a list of questions, it was easier because I wasn’t forcing myself to organize my questions. I learned that I was trying to find a focus while brainstorming, and that is not the point of brainstorming. I learned that webbing is not always the answer and that simply making a list, even though it is just a list, is more productive, less frustrating, and less confusing, when brainstorming questions.
(mind tools???)
Questioning prompts:
Well…isn’t it easy to come up with questions that relate to a topic? It sounds much easier that it actually is. I truly understand why kids look at you like “I don’t know,” because I truly, at some points, didn’t know. Going to ThinkTank really helped me branch out in my thinking. I realized that it is very important to have prompts, whether specific or general, to get the thinking flowing. However, I also realized the value in struggling with questioning first because it helps you come up with the obvious questions first. The prompts then elicited prior knowledge that I didn’t know about, and really helped me develop great questions.
Questioning over time:
I initially thought that the questions would just come to me when I sat down at 2:00 and thought about them. I realized that is totally not the case. Questioning needs to occur over time. In fact, great questions comes to you when you aren’t expecting them. Even futher, I think by sitting down at 2:00 to think of questions puts more pressure on questioning than it does when you are just wondering about the topic for a while.

What I can apply to my teaching:
· Let brainstorming be brainstorming and not forcing students to start to find focus while brainstorming. To enable this, I will not mention anything about organization of their questions. Students can just organize their questions however they wish, through lists or webbing. By letting them choose, it will be a much more natural way for them to document their thinking, not forced into some format that will make the questioning process awkward for them.
· Questioning prompts are a must. Whether they are the simple, 5Ws and Hs, or going to ThinkTank, it will really help students think outside of the box and get the questions flowing more freely.
· Time and time again I ask students to accomplish a task at one time, including questioning. Keeping a journal with them or asking them at different times, and in frequent intervals will keep them thinking about the project, even when they aren’t in my classroom.