Big Questions for Young Minds: Extending Children's Thinking

Introduction

This book is about high-level questions and how they inspire higher-level thinking in young children. As a preschool teacher and teacher trainer, Lisa has discovered how exciting it is when teachers engage children in high-level thinking. Janis, in her work with teachers, sees how they often struggle to develop and use questions that go beyond eliciting rote answers. We wanted to provide some guidance to teachers because we both saw how their comfort with and knowledge of using higher-level questions impacted the quality of their teaching and learning.

We first began writing about high-level questions in a series of articles for Teaching Young Children. We learned that many people were using our articles for staff development trainings. After the publication of the fourth article in the series, which focused on using classroom displays to inspire higher-level, reflective questions (see Chapter 18), a Head Start teacher shared with us the impact that article had on her, saying, It was like a big door opened in front of my eyes or a huge light shined in the darkness of my mind. I could not believe how important and helpful those questions could be.

That is the purpose of this book. With some practice, when teachers use high-level questions, they too can open doors for children to think about and express more complex ideas.

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Model for This Book

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators created what is now called Bloom’s Taxonomy. A taxonomy is a system of classification. Bloom wanted to provide educators a way to classify thinking, understanding, and learning and to measure and organize what they teach. This taxonomy consisted of six levels of cognition, ordered from the simplest to the most complex (Bloom 1956; Fusco 2012):

Knowledge—recalling facts or other information

Comprehension—simple understanding

Application—inferring, or applying information from one situation to another

Analysis—breaking down parts from the whole and understanding their relationships

Synthesis—putting together parts to make meaning

Evaluation—making judgments about the value of something

Over the years, many educational theorists have reinterpreted Bloom’s Taxonomy. Almost 50 years after Bloom first created the taxonomy, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl (2000) incorporated a fresh perspective. They considered the advances in education over the years as well as the evolution of teachers’ thinking about teaching, learning, and assessing their students. They kept somewhat similar categories but substituted evaluation, the final level, with create. This modified version of the taxonomy, which we will continue to refer to as Bloom’s Taxonomy, is the model used in this book because we believe that creating is the critical component that brings the taxonomy to life. The table below compares the two versions.

A Comparison of the Two Versions of the Taxonomies

Teachers often use Bloom’s Taxonomy to ask children a range of questions, including those that prompt children to recall and understand what they’ve learned, apply the information, and do something new with it. Although children do not necessarily move in a systematized way through the levels of cognition (from lowest to highest in order), the taxonomy illustrates that children need a foundation in basic facts and information to be able to use their knowledge at a higher level. The higher levels of the taxonomy help teachers understand how to ask children thoughtful questions that scaffold and extend their learning, encouraging them to think more critically.

While it’s vital to encourage children to think at a higher level, all levels of questions have value. Remembering information is the foundation children need to be able to answer higher-level questions, such as How will you figure out how many plates we need on the table for lunch? And children need to remember that there are three little pigs and a big, bad wolf and understand that the pigs have to figure out how to build strong houses before they can create new characters and a new ending. As you get to know each of the children you work with, you can use these categories as a guide to help you scaffold their thinking and learning. This is particularly important to consider when you work with a child who does not yet have much expressive language or experience answering more complex questions or with children who are dual language learners.

Using This Book

This book is a practical resource for all early childhood professionals who work with children ages 3 through 6 years in classrooms or family child care settings, higher education faculty who work with preservice or graduate-level early childhood teachers, principals or directors of early childhood programs to use with their staff, and families who want to support their children’s learning. The chapters focus on how to integrate high-level questions into the many ways adults interact with young children: in the interest areas of the classroom or family child care setting, during different parts of the daily routine, and while engaging in other learning opportunities. The ideas build on Bloom’s Taxonomy, our combined extensive experience with young children, and the expertise of our esteemed colleagues who served as contributing authors.

Each chapter provides specific tips for getting started and three examples of questions at each of the six levels of questioning (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create). These sample questions will help you think about the types of questions, statements, or comments that are most likely to elicit the thinking you want children to engage in. Each chapter also includes a list of children’s books that support the use of high-level questions (The Picture Book Connection). Throughout the book, we have included many clear, useful tips and strategies.

Part 1: Using Questions in Classroom Interest Areas

Chapters 1–6 describe how to use high-level questions in the basic interest areas of preschool and kindergarten classrooms.

Part 2: Using Questions During Other Parts of the Daily Routine

Chapters 7–12 discuss the use of high-level questions during other parts of the daily routine: class meetings, read-alouds, music time, large motor activities, outdoor time, and mealtimes.

Part 3: More Learning Opportunities with Questions

Chapters 13–19 offer ideas for how to use high-level questions on a daily basis in a variety of contexts (such as supporting emotional development during the first months of school, helping children understand diversity, and introducing new materials) and perhaps some new ways to support high-level thinking you hadn’t thought about before (during multiday explorations, starting off the school year with long-term studies, with classroom displays, and documenting children’s learning).

Part 4: Resources

The resource section contains examples of how to talk to children using questions at all levels in a wide range of situations. There are also questions that can be cut out, laminated onto index cards, put on a ring, and placed around your classroom, in your pocket, or wherever you can easily refer to them. We have also included some reflection questions about the chapters and themes of the book and a list of print and online resources. For families, there are reproducible handouts that encourage the use of high-level questions when talking to their children about their day, during mealtimes, and while reading bedtime stories.

What Are High-Level Questions and How Do They Support Young Children’s Thinking?

Think about these two questions:

What three things do you know about the way young children learn?

How would you design a collage that shows the most important things about the way young children learn?

What kind of thinking does each of these questions require? For the first—which represents the lowest level of question in Bloom’s Taxonomy, remember—you would probably access a list you already have somewhere in your memory, either from information you learned or from your own experience with children. But the second question (the highest level, create) requires you to think in a new way—you likely don’t have a ready-made answer and would engage in some higher-level, complex, and creative thinking. Similarly, when you ask young children basic recall questions, such as how many pigs are in the story of The Three Little Pigs or what color the wolf is, the answers to those questions don’t require much thinking. If a child can’t answer those questions, you might learn that she doesn’t yet know numbers or colors, or that she wasn’t interested in the story. But if you want to engage children in rich cognitive experiences and understand how they think, you might ask, How would you describe the wolf? or How might the three pigs have built different houses if they were fish? It can be challenging to develop and ask high-level questions (If you could come to school any way you wanted, how would you get here? Why?) instead of lower-level questions (How did you get to school this morning?), but it is well worth the effort!

What High-Level Questions Aren’t—and Are

A high-level question is never a yes-or-no question (Do you have a pet?). It is never a question that has an obvious answer (How many wheels does that car have?). Nor is it a question that has only one answer (How old are you?). The answers to those kinds of questions may demonstrate that children understand language, are paying attention, and can count or identify numbers, colors, or shapes, but the questions don’t offer opportunities for children to think very deeply.

Creating a solid base of content knowledge is important—children need to remember information before they can understand it; they must understand it before they can apply it. But you want children’s learning to be deeper and more complex. Asking questions that invite them to apply what they’ve learned or evaluate something encourages them to express their unique ideas. Consider the difference in responses given by a group of kindergartners when shown a mug and asked, What is this? Most replied that the object was a cup or a mug. But when asked what they liked about the mug, Julia responded, It has so many blue swirly rings on it, and I love the big handle. And Juan said, It’s like my abuela’s cup. She always puts cinnamon tea and honey in it when I visit her in Puerto Rico.

A high-level question is always a question that each child will answer in her own way, which indicates that she is using what she knows and what she’s learning instead of just recalling rote information. If it is an effective question, a child will be excited to give you lots of details in her answer and is likely to use complex language. For example, when 3½-year-old Kerry was asked to describe her pet, she said that he was really, really big and his tongue is always dripping and his tail bangs into the coffee table. And when a group of 4-year-olds was asked to describe the most important things about being 4, they came up with a long list of individual accomplishments and privileges, such as You can stay up late to watch the moon and You can somersault and jump up to the sky.

High-level questions encourage children to expand their thinking and perspective on a subject. Fifteen students in a kindergarten class were asked to discuss this question in pairs: If you could design a car that could go really fast, what would it look like and why? The students engaged in long discussions, sketched their answers, and debated which of their car prototypes would be the best and why. Sarah said, It would have jet-propelled giant engines and go faster than the Flash, and Jared said, My car has wings and flies higher than a helicopter, and it is sparkly black and red with four hundred and twelve lights.

Most importantly, a high-level question is developmentally appropriate for the age and stage of the individual child. Most 3-year-olds are primarily concrete thinkers. This means that their speech and thinking are quite literal, often focusing on what is physically in front of them. Some 3-year-olds might not be able to answer the more complicated questions that older children can. Children begin thinking more abstractly around age 4 (Copple & Bredekamp 2006).

Teachers can address every stage of development, from the very concrete thinkers to the more developed abstract thinkers, by using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide to engage in focused lines of questioning. For example, observing a group of 4-year-olds pretending that a stick they found outside is a fork or spoon, you might ask, What kinds of foods would be easy or difficult to eat with your new kind of utensil? If you saw a 3-year-old using the same stick to poke holes or make a line in the dirt, you could say, Tell me about the marks you are making on the ground. Another approach is to simply make an observation about what you notice in children’s play to start a dialogue. For example, to the 4-year-olds you could say, I see you created a new utensil! Or, for the 3-year-old, I see you making such interesting marks in the dirt with that stick.

It’s up to you, the one who knows your students best in an educational setting, to decide which questions are appropriate for which children during a particular interaction. Although not all preschoolers and kindergartners will understand some of the higher-level concepts, you can still ask questions that prompt them to think in those ways. For example, instead