Using QFT to prepare students for new experiences

I first learned about Question Formulation Technique (QFT) when I attended the Exeter conference in the summer of 2015 and then was re-introduced to it at the Knowles fall meeting 2015.  QFT is a process that encourages students to ask many questions, categorize the questions, improve the questions, and then rank the importance of these questions.  QFT was developed in the medical field to help patients ask better questions, however since questions are valuable in many contexts, QFT has been modified for many different contexts.  

I have struggled to find a way to incorporate QFT into my teaching routines especially when the learning targets for a specific day in my geometry classroom are so specific - there is just not a lot of room for a wide open exploration of ideas.  However, in my computer science classroom, part of the goals each day is to increase student interest in the topic matter.  When an opportunity came along to have students visit Target HQ in Minneapolis to work with the engineers and scientists there in their technologies departments, I needed a way to get students ready to engage with these engineers.  Enter QFT.

For a starting point for students, I put together a short paragraph of text from e-mails I had exchanged with my partner at Target as well as snippets from his team members’ LinkedIn profiles.   Students were given 5 minutes to read the paragraph of text and then 2 minutes to summarize what they read or pull out key pieces of information in that text.  From there students were put into groups of 4 students and then were given 12 minutes to generate questions.  12 FULL minutes.  One person documented these questions in a google doc while (in small groups) while their team continued to ask questions.  While some of these questions got off task in unproductive ways, other questions showed how students were making connections to the work Target was doing and their own learning or lives.  

At the end of this time we discussed the difference between open ended and closed questions and students color-coded their questions based on these two distinctions and changed two of their closed questions to be open-ended.  Finally they prioritized their questions to determine what their top 3 questions were and I sent the list of questions to my partner at Target to help him understand what my students were already thinking about before the trip.

At the field trip, students met 5 individuals who worked in different roles related to technology in Target stores.  These people shared their paths to where they were (from planning on being a pilot to a nurse, etc.) and why they like their job that they have now.  Then students broke up into two groups and saw new technologies Target was using (or hoping to use) in their stores to improve the guest experiences.  At the end of the time, students engaged in a short brainstorming activity with the Target engineers who used the student ideas to generate more ideas.  While the experience was fast, because we had gone through the QFT process before the trip, students were ready to hear what the engineers were sharing and students were ready to ask questions throughout the experience.

While I know funds and enthusiasm for field trips is limited, I do see a few opportunities to use QFT in my classroom in the future.

1. In preparation for any guest speaker.  Guest speakers can be a very valuable part of a course and this is especially true in my computer science class where I am trying to get students to see the many different options a career in technology has to offer.  While I do my best to prep guest speakers, I should also prep my students as much as possible.  Furthermore, it can be difficult to know exactly what points the speakers are going to want to touch on more than others.  By preparing students, students can contribute more to the presentation and perhaps guide it with their questions.  With Target, I shared the questions ahead of time with the presenters but in the future, I don’t know if that is necessary or if it takes away some of the authenticity of the experience.
2. Last time I struggled with finding a “data source” for these questions to be generated from.  The paragraph from e-mails I pieced together was a good start.  However, the data source was a bit contrived since I picked what information was shared with students.  I think I could have students look at other data sources more broadly.  For example, I could have students look at a company’s website to generate questions or view a guest speaker’s LinkedIn profile.  Since websites and social media are something that students are accustomed to consuming, so generating questions around these data sources may be a good practice for students to build.

Data isn't so bad after all!

I'll be honest, I wasn't looking forward to the data unit.  Students generally don't take computer science to learn or think about data.  Honestly, a lot of the material felt pretty common sense-y.  I wanted it to be more math-y.  I wanted students to have more skills to create visualizations that were more impressive.  I wanted to make it more focused on social justice.  But, I went with it... surprisingly, it turned out well!

First of all common sense, is never very common.  By the end of this unit, I came to understand that the real learning was about being a critical viewer of data.  My goal for this unit is to build student capacity to generate knowledge from data but also question how visualizations or data collection might have a bias.  This unit certainly provided ample opportunities to build those student skills.

I was able to bring in a lot of real life articles and have a short discussion about them in class.  One of my favorites was about non-voters which as super relevant to the content for the following reasons:

• It told an excellent story and used visualizations to support the story.  
• It used a variety of visualizations (Bar charts, pie graphs, stacked bar graphs)...
• It showed how different visualizations could be used to lead to different recommendations
• The data collection methods and "cleaning" of data was similar to how we cleaned our own in-class data (free-response and then categorized). 

In reality, I think I could have used this as an example of what students could do for our final project in the unit - use several different visualizations to tell your story.

As I graded student work it was clear that next year I need to do more with "story" development.  I should use different articles that tell a story with data and have students read/analyze those.

Additionally, there is still a lot of opportunity for sense-making.  Several projects have severe gaps in sense making.  For example, they made a chart, but it isn't clear what the data actually is about.  I could even do a whole lesson on "naming charts" since a lot of students left of titles or had titles that didn't make sense.  I could give them a bunch of title-less charts and have them come up with the names.

Finally, I tweaked the original project to allow students to explore other data sets that they felt were interesting and relevant to their interests.  I actually had most students take this option which was exciting.  It helped bring out student personalities and also gave them a glimpse into big data - some data sets were QUITE large!  Overall, it turned out well, and I am thinking about how to improve upon it for next year.

For next year, I am still fooling around with these ideas:

• Making it more social justice focused - this is always a goal of mine in math, it seems like here is a great place to do it too.
• Talk more about the use of story in data
• Make more interactive visualizations either with programming or with Google fusion tables
• This would take more programming experience or we would want to walk through one together as a class in google fusion tables before setting students free.
• I could move this to the end of the year and do more in-depth applications if there is time
• Tie this into big data with Kaggle.com's data sets - it actually has a lot of great resources to use!

Wait... is that a learned skill?! Student Share-outs

When a manager or colleague asks me to share out something I am working on, I am able to determine the following:

• What is important to the audience that I need to share
• What is important to me that I want to get across
• What information is helpful and what information is not

What I learned last year (and am re-learning this year) is that knowing this is a learned skill.  I asked students to share out their projects about telling a story with data.  It was amazing to see how many blank stares I was getting.

Students seem to be so used to having a rubric or pseduo-script for presentations that this idea of casually sharing out their learning was not something most students were able to do. 

Ultimately I gave them this (below) guide.  I stressed that this was just the three most important things I thought they should talk about, but it might be different for their project.  It was interesting to see which students stood at the front and answered each question out loud and which ones were able to pull out the big ideas themselves.  

Here is what students were given:

Your presentation should...

Tell us about your data:

• What data did you choose?
• Why did you choose it?
• What was difficult about finding, choosing, or working with your data?

Tell us about the process:

• What did you expect to find?
• What was your process to explore your data?  What different things did you try?  Did you filter your data, use a pivot table, try different visualizations, etc?

Tell the story:

• What story does your data tell?
• What questions does this raise for you?
• What other data would be helpful in telling your story or answering your questions?
• Why is this important/interesting to you?

Defining what participation looks like in a Harkness Classroom

As mentioned before, to make Harkness work, I need students to really be able to understand their role in the classroom.  

I had students read a list of ways they should be participating in class during this time also from Dr. Sauer.  The list is long.  So, after reading the list, I focused on just one of the bullet points.  Specifically, "ask questions".  Together we brainstormed what "asking questions" should look like/sound like.   This next part was really important.  I told students I would be looking for them to ask each other questions each day and would take note of who asked questions.  This would be put into the gradebook as points.   This is a lot like the "participation quizzes" I saw at a KSTF meeting once.  Even though students were at times sarcastically asking one another questions in class just to get the points, it totally worked!   They were ALL about asking each other questions - especially as I got near a group.   I tried to assign competence to students who were authentically asking strong questions. 

Throughout the week, we took a look at a few of the other ways they should participate and discussed what that should look like and sound like.  Over the course of the week, we talked about 1) asking questions, 2) check that others in the group understand the solution, and 3) summarize, clarify, or restate progress made on a particular exercise.  Again, every day I explicitly said I would be looking for these three ways of participating and documenting it.  This held students accountable to the norms in a more visible way for myself and for students. 

This first week, I was the one who re-capped the day and went through specific exercises with the class.  I told them I expected them to make notes on their exercises.  I think I could make this more productive by doing 2 things:

1. Getting a different colored pen for students to make these notes with so it was clear what is new, added information, and what is old.
2. Moving to having students do the majority of the presenting.

Overall, I really think this discussion and structure for participation was what made the class more successful this second time around. 

Harkness Attempt... Take 2 - Learning from observations

At the beginning of the year, I tried using a Harkness method of instruction with one of my math classes.  It is a class with students who have traditionally struggled with math and I knew a lot of them from previous classes.   I blogged about my first attempt here a bit... it didn't go so hot.

I abandoned it and planned on going to observe a teacher in AZ who uses this method exclusively with their students.

At first I thought my students didn't know how to collaborate - I was wrong though.  When I gave them a quiz and then mid-quiz told students they could work with their team, students had a fantastic conversation with one another.  SO... they knew how to talk about math... they just needed a bit more skin in the game.

While in AZ, I observed how a teacher ran their classroom.  I don't know how to put this in a narrative format, so, in no particular order, here's what I learned:

• I don't need to give students time to work on the problems ahead of time - and students don't NEED to do homework.  The teachers I saw gave students 2-3 problems for homework and then discussed them (and maybe a few others) in class the next day.  It seemed do-able.  My group of students is not the best at doing homework, so I was worried that if doing homework was REQUIRED for using harkness, this would not be possible for my students.  Observing gave me hope that this was not necessary.  Don't get me wrong, having students do the work ahead of time would make the material stick with students more.
• I still needed to build discussion norms with students.  At the school I observed, EVERY class was discussion based.  Students were expected to lead discussions more than I think my students ever had been asked to.  So, while the school I observed was philosophically aligned with discussion based learning across content areas, my students would not have the same background in discussion based learning.  This also motivated me to get into some English classrooms to get to see what discussions emerge in other classes and how they are framed/scaffolded. 
• Problems build slowly but also widely.  In this school I saw problems in one class hour that I normally wouldn't see in the same unit or even same year in a traditional curriculum.  I totally get the benefit of this AND perhaps if we did more of this we wouldn't end up re-teaching linear equations, slopes, quadratics, SohCahToa, OVER and OVER again each year.
• There is an ebb and flow to the class.  The teacher would bring the class together to clarify something for the group, making sure everyone was focused on him/her for a bit, and then give students a clear "now with this information, go do _______".  This helped re-focus the class when needed.

Alright.  So, I observed.  I thought about how I was going to apply this in my classroom.  After 2 weeks of processing all of this I rolled it out in my classroom. 

Learning from last time and knowing that I needed students to think differently about learning - maybe even radically differently about learning,  I had students read an article that Dr. Jonothon Sauer gave me about how we learn.  It was actually a hugely helpful way to start off.  Students were confused as to why we were reading in math.  I think shocking them a bit out of their comfort zone with this article helped set a tone for a "new era".  That being said, the discussion we had was equally as important.  When I asked students to summarize the article... some of their summaries were inaccurate at best.  In fact, some of what they supposedly "got" from the article was downright wrong.   I am planning on going back to this article in a few weeks to re-read and process it together. 

From there we talked about how participation should look.