Instructional Repertoires - Safety & Accountability

FRAMING QUESTIONS AND LESSON DESIGN

This series of workshops focuses on how we as teachers can ensure active participation in our classroom - the balance between safety and accountability. We use the research of Madeline Hunter into Mastery Teaching and combine this with the work of Barrie Bennett on the power of framing questions.

Madeline Hunter's work focuses on seven main components of effective lesson design:

• Anticipatory Set or Mental Set
• Sharing the Objective and Purpose
• Input/Information to be learned
• Modeling
• Checking for Understanding
• Practice - Guided and Independent
• Closure

Barrie Bennett's work on framing questions suggests that it is not the same as simply asking questions "...you have the question, now frame it, give it some life, some guidelines, make it do something." This series of workshops will explore Bennett’s work on:

• the idea of "foreshadowing" what will happen – how safe, how accountable
• thinking about how many students you want involved.
• being sensitive to who and how you will ask and how you will respond.
• the role of framing questions as a skill that drives the more complex tactics and strategies such as Think Pair Share and Concept Attainment