Chapter 4: Responding to Student Questions Without Giving Answers

Chapter 4 Responding to student questions without giving answers. Maybe it will just have to remain a mystery forever. The assertion of ignorance is a pedagogical strategy that dates back to the earliest accounts of teaching and is probably even older than that. When the responsibility for responding to an inquiry is redirected back onto the student, it sends a message that the struggle to think through the question is more important than the answer itself. Researchers have long known that it is more likely for students to recall answers they have previously figured out on their own, compared with something they were simply told. However, like many aspects of teaching, being able to do something as seemingly simple as not answering a question from a student turns out to be surprisingly difficult. This is especially true for science teachers, many of whom have spent countless hours mastering their own understandings and are eager to share their hard-won knowledge, especially when doing so comes with admiration, relief, and gratitude from students. Not answering questions may take even more skill than answering them, and when my own preserver's teachers ask me how not to answer their student's questions, I usually tell them about Mr. Teague. I first met Mr. Teague many years ago when I was working as a substitute for another physics teacher with whom he shared a room, and I was immediately struck by the way he did not answer his student's questions. Much later when I asked if I might spend a little time watching him teach, he jumped at the opportunity, saying that having an education researcher in his classroom meant that he might also be able to learn something. I started coming by weekly and brought donuts, which Mr. Teague always shared with his home-room students and the other science teachers. Mr. Teague's physics classroom was located on the top floor of his school, at the distant end of a long hallway, far from the buzz of activity in the rest of the building. It was not a classroom anyone had to pass on their way to somewhere else, and this contributed to an atmosphere of safety and isolation, an oasis of tranquility and a bustling urban school. His classroom was one in which students were invited to act like scientists themselves, and there was usually some sort of equipment out on the back tables, as well as the demonstration apparatus up front that the students were encouraged to play around with at their leisure. An enormous slide rule hung by police above the front chalkboard, and a bookshelf of popular physics books sat in front of the teacher desk. Habinets overflowing with force tables, oscilloscopes, wave tanks, and old computers took up the sidewall, and low-set black lab benches filled the back-third of the room. Each time I visited Mr. Teague's classroom, it seemed that he was teaching differently. On days when students were involved in an ongoing lab, he would give them the bare minimum of instruction before sending them back to the lab tables. When starting a new topic, he would show the students video clips, which he stopped frequently to add commentary. There are also days when he lectured and performed physics demonstrations for the students. Students in the class kept a lab book on quadril paper, in which they also recorded class notes. Mr. Teague would examine and mark these after each lab activity, yet the huge pyramid of books to mark on his side table never seemed to decrease in size. While in many respects it resembled the typical physics classroom, Mr. Teague's class was much different than my own experience as a student in high school physics. While my own physics teacher in high school had certainly worked hard to foster a love of physics in his students, I often felt as if physics was a disconnected series of facts to be memorized. Even in lab, when the opportunity of discovery is greatest, it often felt as if I were working towards some predetermined goal. The most potent symbol of this type of learning is the percent error statistic. By use of a simple formula, a student is able to determine how far away their results are from an actual value. The hidden message in such classrooms is that there is a right answer, and the authority of finding it lies beyond the student. One mark of a healthy classroom environment is the presence of a substantial amount of subject related talking by students. Asking questions to the teacher and to other students is an important part of this discourse, and in my visits there were certainly lots of questions asked in Mr. Teague's class. These range from simple questions about requesting supplies and clarifying laboratory procedure to more complex questions about what would happen if someone traveling at the speed of light through a ball. When I first saw Mr. Teague's teaching in action, I noticed that sometimes he answered students' questions quite thoroughly, while other times he hardly answered them at all. What I discovered was that Mr. Teague's responses to his students' questions depended on both the type of information being requested and the urgency with which he thought the possession of an answer was necessary. Over time I was able to identify five different types of responses, and when I shared my analysis with him, Mr. Teague added a sixth that I had missed, one which was much more difficult to observe. Looking across each of these types of responses below, it is evident that deciding whether it was more important for students to engage in productive struggle or to have an answer was almost always in the forefront of Mr. Teague's decision-making about responding to his students' questions. Playful non-answers. I don't know. These answers were mostly given in response to the "is this right" variety of questioning. Mr. Teague affectionately referred to this category of answers as "creative sarcasm", but it was clearly more than that. Each time that Mr. Teague answered a question in this way, he saw it as a conscious choice to foster an understanding of the nature of science on the part of his students. This way Mr. Teague says, "Nature is the arbiter." "Nature" or "the equipment" is the bad guy. The teacher isn't the one giving the bad news, it's the data. Student hooking up a circuit. Am I doing it right? Teacher. You're doing it right if it works. You're not doing it right if it doesn't work. Student working on a computer circuit simulation. Is this relationship inverse squared or just inverse? Teacher. It could be inverse or inverse squared, or maybe it'll just have to remain a mystery forever. Student showing Mr. Teague the lab setup with hands on the two different power supplies. If I keep this one constant and keep increasing this one, will this amateur reading increase too? Teacher. Smiling. Well, it'll either increase or it won't. Clarifying questions, reflective statements. For these, Mr. Teague tended to sidestep answering the actual question, and instead focused on making the student feel like they themselves had the authority to provide an answer based on their experiences in the class. He did this with simple statements that reflected what the student had already done or already knew. Sometimes, Mr. Teague chose pointed questions in order to force students to make the conceptual connections needed to answer their own questions. Student. Pointing to a component of the current balance. Do we measure the length from here to here or from there to there? Teacher. The electricity comes in here and goes along like this. Traces path with finger. Student. Oh, so we measure this whole thing. Student, gesturing toward the graph on the computer screen. Is this destructive interference? Teacher. Well, it says totally destructive on the instruction sheet, doesn't it? And it looks like you still have a wave at this point. Student. Pointing at their circuit setup. This looks right, but I just want to be sure. Teacher. Well, you hooked this up here, and I see the wires connected there and there. This type of response allowed the students to see their particular questions from a different perspective, and this usually had a clarifying effect that permitted students to answer their own questions by themselves. Procedurally suggestive. While still forcing the student to engage in the intellectual challenge of the activity, there was an element of practicality to these responses as well, as they contained more of a hint on how to proceed than the previous categories. By responding this way, Mr. Teg attempted to assist the student without giving away too much or investing too much authority in the science teacher as a sole source of answers. Student. Showing Mr. Teg a piece of apparatus. Our L-clips aren't working. Teacher. Wiggles a loose L-clip. You can play with them a bit, walks away. Student. Referring to a circuit breaker reset button on the power supply. Can you come over and tell us if this button is popped out? Teacher. I'll bet your amateur will do that for you. Student. That's what we're trying to test. Teacher. Oh, so both ameters are broken? Student. Yeah, it. Oh, it must be the wire. Student. Showing Mr. Teg her data. Is this right? Teacher. I don't know. We'll have to see when we look at this. Points to the sample graph on the board and see how it fits. Student. Hooking up a circuit. How do you know if the current is flowing the right way? Teacher. Some people think about positive and negative. Some people just hook it up and see if it goes the direction they want. Direct answers in pursuit of a larger question. Direct answers to questions that arose in the course of an inquiry-based activity were offered less frequently than other types of responses, but appeared to be necessary on occasion in order to move a student along toward a more substantial questions. They were the answers of last resort for the big questions, but occasionally time constraints made their use pragmatic. It's very much a function of how rushed I feel and the level of stress Mr. Teg told me. Sometimes I know they're just going to ask a friend. Sometimes I want that and sometimes I don't. Usually what happens if they don't get it, they'll come in during lunch or after school and I'll clue them in much more. And if it's a summary thing, I run the risk that if I don't tell them, they'll never get it. And if you do, they still might not, I added. Exactly, he said. obviously frustrated trying to take a measurement on a current balance that will not stop moving. Looks to Mr. Teague and effectively communicates her question nonverbally. Teacher, that's the hardest part of this lab. There's parallax and sometimes it keeps moving up and down. It's okay to sort of stop it in the middle. Student, showing Mr. Teague her set up. "Does this go here?" Teacher. "If I said no, you would not know too much more, would you?" So I'll say no. Student, talking to Mr. Teague with her entire lab group, they are uncomfortable with the data they have collected. Can we do this over? Teacher, sure, the equipment's over there. Students begin to walk away. Can I see your data? One student hands Mr. Teague her lab notebook and he looks it over. Actually, your data is good enough to start analyzing. You don't have to do it over. Student, for the beats, do you want us to draw all three of these? Peaks on the curve? Teacher, yes, it's complicated, I know. Actually, it is hard to draw, so it's okay if you just pick two sections of the graph and draw all the beats. Administrative or safety oriented direct answers. It might seem unnecessary to include this category, but the fact that Mr. Teague answered these administrative or safety oriented questions in a regular way allowed the students to see that Mr. Teague was not opposed to answering all of the questions that were posed to him. Student, is this circuit set up okay? Teacher, why don't you turn that power supply down? I think it's about to blow. Student, do you have some clear tape? Teacher, not much. Here, hands the student a roll of masking tape, which works fine. Teacher, is everything working okay? Student, is it okay if we leave the power supply plugged in? Teacher, sure. Questions unasked and unanswered. Mr. Teague himself added the sixth category after he agreed that the other five categories were an accurate reflection of his practice. There were times he told me when he made a conscious decision not to make himself available for questioning. This was usually accomplished by going out in the hall, tinkering with something in the prep room, or by simply staying in the front of the room and out of the lab area. Without his presence as a resource, his intent was to force students to solve problems on their own. Though I don't just want them sitting there, he told me. If they're not asking each other any questions, then I'll have some to ask. While he still monitored students' conversations as they worked, by choosing carefully which times to make himself physically unavailable for questioning, he intentionally forced his students to rely on each other for figuring things out. During my time in his classroom, I found that his students realized that they could put me to the test of whether or not I understood the way Mr. Teague responded to their questions. Because Mr. Teague had introduced me to his classes as a fellow physics teacher, I was regularly asked questions by the students if I happened to be standing in the right place at the right time. One morning, I was watching a group of students struggle with a circuit containing a few bulbs, an ammeter, and a power supply. The bulbs were lighting, but they were getting no reading on the ammeter. It was evident to me that they had their positive and negative terminals on the ammeter switched, because whenever they closed the circuit, I could see the needle moving ever so slightly to the left of zero, a sign that the current was moving in the opposite direction. Finally, in frustration, one of the students turned to me and said, "How come nothing's happening when we turn the power on?" I decided to try to answer this question the way I thought Mr. Teague might. "Do it again, let me see," I said. "Look, nothing's happening," the student asserted. I watched the needle drift the millimeter or so back to zero. I decided on a response midway between clarifying and procedurally suggested. "Something is happening," I said and left it at that. The group scratched their heads for a little bit longer, but eventually figured it out after I had walked away. It would have been very easy for me to simply tell them which wires were hooked up backward, but this would have had two drawbacks. In the short term, the students would have been robbed of the opportunity to think through and solve a problem with their own creation. In the long term, it would have reinforced the notion that physics teachers, and not students themselves, are the only authoritative sources for knowledge in the classroom. This seemed consistent with Mr. Teague's view of teaching, and when I shared this story with him, he agreed that I had treated this situation much in the same way he would have. What's funny sometimes, he said, is that the kids who are dependent on the teacher for answers get really frustrated in my class. A few years back, there were these two kids. One of them ended up dragging me down into a meeting with the principal. It was the cutest thing, actually, and she said to him, "This guy is not doing his job." Now she's a friend and she comes around and sees why I do that. I've actually developed a little bit of a reputation in the school, and now even the biology and chemistry teachers will tell their students. You know, when you get to physics, the teacher isn't going to answer a question like that, so you might as well get used to figuring it out on your own now. A Copenhagen interpretation. On the wall in the back of Mr. Teague's classroom is a famous picture of the 1928 Copenhagen Gathering of Physicists, and next to it is an enormous periodic table, published around the same time, which Mr. Teague told his classes was the first one ever purchased by the school. Numerous squares on the table were blank, because at the time some of the elements we know about today had not yet been discovered. He told me the reason he likes to keep the poster up is to remind his students that all of what they study in his introductory physics class, which includes mechanics, optics, sound, electricity, and magnetism. Only takes them through what was known in physics up to the early 20th century. It is a powerful reminder that what we know now has not always been known, and that much of our current knowledge has blank squares of its own. This periodic table with the blank spaces in it is also a metaphor for the way Mr. Teague views how people learn to pose and solve problems. The scientists who eventually filled in the missing elements on the periodic table did not do so by appealing to an authority for answers. They did it by asking questions, posing problems, and designing and carrying out their own investigations. Of course, students have numerous resources to help them find answers, such as friends, textbooks, and the internet. But that is also the point. Scientists do not work alone. They are part of a scientific community, and as students learn how to operate within this community, they become better scientific thinkers, working much like scientists do outside of schools. By viewing student questions as integral components of learning how to pose and solve problems, rather than as ends in themselves, Mr. Teague was also teaching his students how to think and act like scientists. In science, crafting good questions to ask is often even more important than the answers. When Mr. Teague said, "Maybe it'll just have to remain a mystery forever," he meant it, because scientists must contend with the ever-present possibility that the answers they seek will remain elusive. While evidence may never provide perfect answers to our students' questions, it will almost certainly help them in deciding what question to ask next, as well as empowering them to feel that they have the authority to do the asking.