Chapter eight in Becoming a Better Teacher continues on with the importance of questions. The chapter itself is titled “Action Research: Asking and Answering Questions About Practice” and sounded fairly daunting to me upon first read. The essential question posed is “how do questions teach?” and touches upon what has been discussed about questions in previous chapters.
We can ask ourselves questions about our own practice and how we can improve and we can ask students questions to probe them about their learning and (again) our own practice. Is our curriculum and teaching style engaging to kids? Ask them; students know which classes they enjoy and why.
The chapter lays out how to plan and execute action research which can be implemented by teachers to answer important questions about many topics or issues. Steps are laid out for teachers to follow to help them decide why questions they want answered, why it’s important for them to be answered, and how to collect the data which they collect.
Continuing on, the book discussed how to actually assess the data found, how to use it, and how to share it with others.
To be honest, I found this chapter to be the least engaging of the book, though I do see the value in it. Perhaps it becomes more meaningful when the rest of the curriculum design and planning has been put into action in the classroom already (something which I have not fully done yet), but I found the information less engaging than previously discussed through the book.
If you want to buy Becoming a Better Teacher (which I assure you has been extremely informative and helpful prior to this somewhat less-engaging chapter), here’s the link to its Amazon page.
katieisateacher.com 