Question everything

Chapter 13 of John Lee's "Visualizing Elementary Social Studies Methods" deals with assessment, and one of the informal techniques that's closest to my heart has to do with questioning. Lee talks about how questions should be framed in such a way as to lead to meaningful responses and how they ought to be open-ended and inviting.

Of course, this got me thinking about my time as a journalist. That's what reporters do. They ask questions. And they don't even have to be deep thoughtful questions. No, the questions a reporter asks are designed to do one thing above all else, and that is, they are supposed to get the subject talking. It's important to get the interview subject to drop their defenses and open up about themselves, their work or their lives. It's not exactly the Socratic Method, but it's important to get students used to provide thoughtful, reflective answers on various subjects addressed in class. Even the shy ones must be prodded, very carefully, to voice their opinions or provide a cogent response.

One time, a few years ago, I was invited to be interviewed on a radio station in the Twin Cities. Michael Jackson had just died, and the station wanted an "expert" to talk about how his death would affect prices for Michael Jackson memorabilia. It was a half-hour show, and I was pretty nervous. See, it's comfortable for me to be the interviewer, but up until that time, I had rarely ever been interviewed myself. The fact that I was not really much of an expert on Michael Jackson memorabilia made it all the more nerve-wracking, but I was representing my magazine, so I needed to be on. Somehow, I got through it, although it was a bit rough. It helped that only days beforehand I had interviewed an actual memorabilia expert about this exact topic.

The morale of this story, if there is one, is that as adults, we're often called on to do things that we aren't comfortable doing. Using questioning in the classroom can at least prepare students for these types of situations they will probably face later on in life. So, as educators, we're not just assessing. We're preparing students for life after school. Assessing a child's learning serves a couple of purposes: one, it helps teachers figure out where their students are at as far as their educational development; and two, assessment just might help them when confronting difficult situations in the working world.