The Asking and Answering Questions Professional Development provides strategies to teach students how to ask and answer questions more effectively to improve comprehension in the classroom and on standardized assessments such as the STAAR. Using the Question and Answer Relationship (QAR), students learn how to decipher what types of questions they are being asked and where to find the answers. This professional development containing 9 video clips and supporting documents, presented by Catlin Goodrow, is intended to be viewed sequentially.
In this introductory clip, Catlin presents an overview of the Asking and Answering Questions training. The first part of the training is about teaching students to meaningfully ask questions about the text, and the second part covers teaching students to meaningfully answer questions.
Materials needed:
Final Reflection:
Read over Slides 9-12. Think about your data. What does the data at your school indicate about why it's important to teach students to ask and answer questions well?
Note: Remember, although we may highlight or focus on one strategy to make the strategy explicit, we need to ensure that our students know that strategies don’t happen in isolation. We use multiple strategies automatically and interchangeably; and usually, we use more than one at a time. We do not want to teach isolated strategies for very long at all. Michael Pressley (2000) tells us that, “Strategies are taught just a few at a time and students learn to coordinate multiple strategies as they read. Strategies instruction is long-term and woven through the content areas so students learn to apply appropriate strategies to comprehend a wide range of genres” (Isreal & Duffy, p. 512).