Questioning skills to support design thinking

The first step in the design thinking process, empathizing, requires students to identify a problem or process from the point of view of the intended audience. Developing this empathetic mindset requires asking lots of questions of others and themselves. (For more on the design thinking model, take a look at my Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything: Design Thinking page where I include overviews, lesson plans, and videos for incorporating the design thinking process across the curriculum.)

Learning to ask good questions takes a lot of practice. As educators, we spend time developing essential questions for units of study. I often refer to the work of Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins dealing with essential questions. I use their book and summaries to help teachers learn the best way to develop these types of inquiry-based questions. Here is a cheat-sheet for teachers, developed by Intel, covering the McTighe and Wiggins model of teacher questioning. Another interesting publication, the EQ Guidebook, from the Global Digital Citizen Foundation, provides practice and tools to help you turn a non-essential question into an essential question.

As I looked over the McTighe and Wiggins list of the seven defining characteristics of an essential question, I was struck by how some of these same characteristics could be utilized by students as they develop their inquiry question for their design thinking project. The useful characteristics from McTighe and Wiggins include these which state that a question:

• Is thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, often sparking discussion and debate.
• Calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, prediction. It cannot be effectively answered by recall alone.
• Raises additional questions and sparks further inquiry.
• Requires support and justification, not just an answer.

Asking factual questions is easy. Coming up with well-created questions to guide a project also takes some additional study of the types of questions. Jorge Juan Perales provides a useful article for designers on how to develop good questions. Perales also included an interesting portion of a book by Michael J. Marquardt, Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask, which provides a great overview of the various types of open-ended questions that can be used by students to start the design thinking process.

• Explorative questions force expansion on new points of view and uncovered areas. Have you thought of…?
• Affective questions reveal people’s feelings about something. How do you feel about…?
• Reflective questions encourage more elaboration. What do you think causes…?
• Probing questions invite a deeper examination. Can you describe how…?
• Analytical questions look for the roots of a problem. What are the causes of…?
• Clarifying questions help align and avoid misunderstandings. So, you mean that..?

If students have trouble with brainstorming or coming up with an idea or question for an invention or innovation, here is an exercise from Invent Iowa’s former site that can help. Have students pick one item from each column and see what interesting inventions they come up with. After they get the hang of it, have students add additional words to each column to create even more choices. You can also extend this activity by having students write the inquiry question for the invention/innovation they develop. For instance, the innovation “Furniture that reduces the dangers for small children” might prompt an inquiry-based question of “How can furniture be developed to make sure young children are both comfortable and safe?”

STUDENT QUESTIONING SITES

• Terry Heick
  • 8 strategies to help students to ask great questions
• John Spencer
  • How to help students develop better questions by creating a culture of inquiry
• Rebecca Stobaugh
  • Sparking student questioning
• Jackie Gerstein
  • Learners should be developing their own essential questions
• Warren Berger
  • 5 ways to have your students become better questioners

FOLLOW-UP

How do you teach students to create inquiry-based questions?  Do you have a particular model you use (or have developed) to target the empathize component of the design thinking process? Please share on Twitter! #kathyschrock

Thinking processes and STEM

STEM, with its combined focus on science, technology, engineering and math, should also include the important skill of learning how to think. There are many models of thinking processes available to teach to students, each with a different focus or goal. I am going to showcase some of the most popular and let you, as the creative educator, pick the one that best meets the needs of your students. You might even decide to take the most relevant parts of each and develop your own model!

After you read about each model, ask yourself the following questions.

• How would I introduce this model into the classroom?
• What content in the STEM curriculum would benefit most from this model?
• What can I easily adapt to infuse this model?
• What would implementation of this model look like in the classroom?
• What would be my goal(s) for students when using this model?
• Where can I find additional resources on this model?

Model 1: Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, a revision of a cognitive thinking classification, was published in 2001 by Anderson and Krathwohl. Their goal was to move the elements of the classification from static to action verbs and combine the classification with four types of knowledge acquisition for students. From these two components, the cognitive process dimension and the knowledge dimension, teachers could create learning objectives and help students move through the levels of the basic taxonomy – Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating – and move them from the use of lower order thinking skills to the higher order thinking skills.

Anderson and Krathwohl defined the Knowledge Dimension as a place for student to move from concrete through abstract knowledge, and through the four categories of factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge.

We are all familiar with the Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy classification of the cognitive processes.

However, the most useful part of helping students move through these levels, as they learn something new, are the more specific verbs that fall under the six broader categories in the pyramid image.

In 2008, Andrew Churches mapped the Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy to the use of technology to help students move from the lower to higher order thinking skills and published Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy.

Additional resources for Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

• Link to a useful handout that outlines more about this thinking skills process
• Keywords and questions at each level of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy.
• Apps and tools to support Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy

Model 2: Computational thinking

Computational thinking (CT), as defined in Google’s “Computational Thinking for Educators” course as a…

…problem solving process that includes a number of characteristics and dispositions. CT is essential to the development of computer applications, but it can also be used to support problem solving across all disciplines, including the humanities, math, and science. Students who learn CT across the curriculum can begin to see a relationship between academic subjects, as well as between life inside and outside of the classroom.

https://computationalthinkingcourse.withgoogle.com/unit ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=69&v=u_JWGzIAdNo

Traditionally, the broad overview of Computational Thinking was “an approach to solving problems in a way that can be solved by a computer”. The model has students thinking like a computer scientist in areas across the curriculum. Computational thinking is not programming or coding. It is the formal planning process that occurs before the programming or coding occur. As Higson outlines in this video , computational thinking is the process by which students use their knowledge of what computers can do to help them solve problems.

There are four traditional components in the process of computational thinking, as outlined on the BBC Bitesize site –

• decomposition – breaking down a complex problem or system into smaller, more manageable parts
• pattern recognition – looking for similarities among and within problems 
• abstraction – focusing on the important information only, ignoring irrelevant detail
• algorithms – developing a step-by-step solution to the problem, or the rules to follow to solve the problem

The computational thinking process is different than the Bloom’s Revised taxonomy thinking process because it is not hierarchical. Each of the four components are equally as important in the thinking process of solving the problem.

Additional resources for Computational Thinking

• Bringing computational thinking to K-12
• Jeannette M. Wing: Computational thinking
• Lesson plans across the curriculum using CT
• Computational thinking across the curriculum
• Resources and support material for computational thinking

Model 3: Design Thinking

My favorite definition of design thinking is from Kricia Cabral on the Scholastic site, who states “design thinking is a creative problem-solving process that calls for thoughtful solutions to real-world situations”. Design thinking is a thinking process that can work nicely for the STEM curriculum topics as well as across other content areas.

There are many, many design thinking models, all of which promote a similar thinking process. Following are images and links to some popular models. Libby Hoffman included some of the ones below in a blog post and I have added additional models that I think are well-stated and useful.

• The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (Stanford)
• The IDEO Model
• Google Design Sprints
• The Tallyfy Model of Design Thinking

The Launch Cycle for K-12

My favorite model for K-12!

• Resources and materials to support the design thinking model

Do you have a specific thinking model you use with your students? Have you developed your own? Please share your thoughts, links, and resources on Twitter! #kathyschrock