There was so much information in this chapter that it left my head spinning. I've had assignments involving questioning before, but this is the first time that I've seen it broken down to this degree. One thing that really caught my attention was how much the levels of questioning aligned with Bloom's Taxonomy. I can't imagine that was a coincidence. It's important that we align our questions with these objectives so that we can systematically build our inquiries in difficulties.
I think that the Socratic method discussed in the chapter has a lot to do with that building of questioning. Socrates started out with simple questions for his students, but he continued to build "whys" as he moved through the progression of questions. While we don't have to imitate Socrates all the time, it's important to use this type of questioning with students because it forces them to constantly evaluate their own answers. Look at it like this: we start with "in the box" questions about a subject, then we move to "out of the box" questions which require a student to support the answer, then we move to "about the box" questions that require the student to evaluate why they believe what they believe. This might be fairly new in the scope of educational questioning, but this was the Socratic method. It's still just as relevant today as it was then.
I love this concept. Looking back on my own schooling, questions too often focused on what we knew. At the highest level, we were only required to offer evidence to support our argument. But rarely, if ever, were we required to think about why we held certain beliefs or ideas. To put that into curriculum based examples, I remember learning about the Civil War in History class. We were always asked to identify the causes, but only on a basic level. It would result in answers like, "The North wanted to abolish slavery so the South rebelled." The effect was always war. But as I got older and started to really think deeply about the subject, I learned that the causes dated back decades—even as early as the War of 1812—and the effect wasn't always war. To move that to the highest level of thinking, I began questioning whether war really was unavoidable as I had been taught.
When you begin to see these examples on your own, it makes you begin to question a lot of what you've learned. If we can get our students doing this early on, we can really have amazing conversations about History. We can encourage students to think about what they've learned and whether they really believe what they believe. It can cause students to come forward with amazing questions, and can spark some very in depth conversations in the classroom. This is the highest level of thinking to me. It's about encouraging our students to question what they know and understand themselves better in the process. I think that's what the authors were eluding to in this chapter. They may have only discussed questioning, but the end result is always a better understanding of the world around them.
Sam - I agree that I think it's a good think to get middle school students thinking at higher cognitive levels. I think my experience in school was much like yours in that I was rarely asked what I thought about a topic, but rather I was asked to recall information. It's amazing to me how often Bloom's Taxonomy and the Socratic method comes up in my education classes. I remember first discussing these in the lower-level courses. At that time I was unaware how important these concepts would become. As you explain how these higher-order thinking questions can be applied in a history classroom, I think that are just as important in an English classroom - as well as all other content areas. These kinds of questions are not only important to include in secondary classrooms, but also at the middle school level.
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