The Question Cycle

The four principles of TEFA are general and flexible by design, so that they may productively guide instruction in almost any circumstance. To help teachers implement the principles, TEFA specifies a particular, tangible pattern of classroom activity called the question cycle (introduced in Dufresne et al. 1996). It is an iterative cycle of question posing, answering, and discussing, aided by CRS technology, that forms a scaffold for structuring whole-class interaction.

The essential phases of the cycle are:

1. Pose a question or problem to the students, generally challenging, often multifaceted. (In TEFA, we do not teach first and then ask questions about what was taught; we ask questions first, and use them as a context for sense-making and direct instruction.)
2. Have students wrestle with the question—alone, in small groups, or both in succession—and decide upon a response.
3. Use a CRS to collect responses (even from students who are uncertain) and display a chart of the aggregated responses.
4. Elicit from students as many different reasons and justifications for the chosen responses as possible, without revealing which (if any) is (or are) correct. In the process, draw out students’ reasoning and vocabulary, expose them to each others’ ideas, and make implicit assumptions explicit.
5. Develop a student-dominated discussion of the assumptions, perceptions, ideas, and arguments involved. Help students formulate their ideas and practice talking science, find out why they think what they do, and gently increase their understanding. (In practice, phases 4 and 5 usually blend together.)
6. Provide a summary, micro-lecture, meta-level comments, segue to another question, or whatever other closure seems warranted, informed by the detailed data just obtained on students’ thinking. (The class should now be well primed to receive the message, appreciate its relevance, and integrate it with other knowledge.

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What’s interesting is the question cycle -” an iterative pattern of CRS-based questioning that can serve multiple instructional needs iterative pattern of CRS-based questioning thatcan serve multiple instructional needs”

Are you a Driver Training Manager tasked with CPC training? You probably don’t need me to tell you that drivers don’t like sitting in a classroom and if they can, they will sit quietly all day, nod when they have to and answer when they must.

More and more Driver Training Managers are using Qwizdom’s Audience Response Systems/Interactive Voting Systems in their training sessions to make their presentations more interactive, get drivers involved and to ensure they’re both learning and getting the answers correct.

As well as seeing the results appear live on the screen, post session results are available in excel and pdf, which means you can compare results from class-to-class, year-to-year and even from depot to depot.

From Housing Associations to Resident Involvement Groups to Community Engagement Initiatives, Qwizdom has been used and is being used to empower communities. Tower Hamlets used Qwizdom’s Audience Response Systems to enable 800 residents to decide what they wanted to spend council money on.

Close to 70 Housing Associations, such as Derby Homes, Barnet Homes & Croydon, use Qwizdom to engage with their residents, with a view to finding out what residents want from their Housing Association.

Community Engagement officers from countless local authorities use Qwizdom on a daily basis to engage with their local communities.

These organisations use Qwizdom’s interactive voting for a number of reasons. The RF technology allows up to 1000 participants to get involved; voting is anonymous; results are available real-time, meaning audience members can see what they voted for; post session, results are collated automatically – no more time spent collecting handsheets, entering data onto excel and publishing; up to 10 different question types are available including multiple choice, alpha-numeric, text, true/false, demographic.

It’s at the concept that students are now co-creators rather than passive vessels.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/video/2010/jul/13/mathematics-busking

If you haven’t already, you can check out some new Qwizdom presentations over on our Slideshare site. Currently, there’s a bit of everything there, all to be used alongside your Qwizdom student response systems. There are ICT quizzes, You Are The Ref Games, Maths Presentations, History, Literature and a few more beyond that.

http://www.slideshare.net/Qwizdom

The paper looks at the impact of different empowerment activities and includes details of how Qwizdom’s Audience Response System was used in Tower Hamlets’ participatory budgeting project.

http://www.participatorybudgeting.org.uk/documents/CDF%20engaging%20communities.pdf

A Victorian classroom(think of the Australian Victoria, not the British Queen) complete with the very cutting edge technology deployed in Victorian schools, is to be packed down and re-built in Shanghai as part of the Victorian displays at the World Expo, where 60,000 people a day are expected to wonder through.

In preparation, 20 students from Balwyn North Secondary College and Glen Waverley Secondary College prepared presentations on their work on the local area of Melbourne to show during a media day. These presentations consisted of quiz based slides to test the students on their city using Qwizdom.

We were able to catch up with a few of the teachers involved:

Content delivery and assessment in classrooms is too often dull and impersonal. Qwizdom, on the other hand, makes teacher-student and student-student interactions much more fun and engaging. Whether you’re assessing prior knowledge, or facilitating a student-led activity, Qwizdom and its effectiveness is only limited by your imagination

Marcus Sharp, Director of Xplore, Balwyn High School,Victoria.

The benefit of Quizdom is that it turns otherwise boring, low-level recall of information into a fun and engaging activity for the students. The competitive aspect of it really tunes kids in, and there are opportunities to use the students’ responses to quiz questions for spontaneous further discussion and learning. It’s a fun way to go about the important task of checking for understanding.

Jonathan Heard, Student Learning & Wellbeing Manager, Balwyn High School,Victoria.

Qwizdom demonstrated their classroom response system (interactive voting system) to nearly 100 conference delegates, showing them how the system is being successfully used by the Children’s University in Kent to engage and interact with students and obtain honest, timely feedback.

Qwizdom would like to thank Ger, Triinu and Guy from the Children’s University for the invitation and we look forward to taking part next year.

If you would like to further information on the work Qwizdom are doing with the Children’s University, please contact Eddie Morgan on eddie.morgan@qwizdom.co.uk