1. The importance of critical thinking in the 21st Century
1.1. The jobs of today (and tomorrow) require complex mental knowledge and mental work. The skills will keep changing as societies' and world needs change.
1.2. Educational efforts should focus on building the right skills, and turning them ti better jobs and better lives. Schools must prepare students for the skills, knowledge, and dispositions (the habits of mind) they will need in college and in tomorrows careers and workplaces.
1.3. The answer to the question "What does it mean to be literate in a connected world?" is ever-changing. Research shows that reading online is a very complex process that requires knowledge of search engines, how information is organized and accessed in their websites, and inferential and comprehension monitoring skills
1.3.1. Students need new comprehension skills, strategies, dispositions, and social practices of the Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs) to effectively read and comprehend multimodal text on the internet and develop New Literacies.
2. How to use the QtA technique
2.1. The QtA technique has 3 main components: planning the implementation, creating queries and developing discussions.
2.1.1. Planning the implementation: before you begin, select the text and decide what you want your students to understand or analyze from this text. Chunk the text into manageable sections, and plan for queries in each segment.
2.1.2. Creating queries: This step should include deposing the authority of the text their students will be reading. Use a think-aloud about the text.
2.1.3. Developing discussions: after students have interacted with the text, a discussion should be initiated to help students note the features of the experience that just occurred. Includes marking, turning back, revoicing, modeling, annotating, and recapping.
2.2. Using the Qta with short text selections and powerful modeling, feedback, guided practice, and class discussions, will make QtA use more student-initiated and directed over time.
3. Essential Questions
3.1. "Big Ideas" are the fundamental and recurring themes of each discipline, they categorize and help us make sense of many (and at times seemingly unrelated) facts.
3.2. Essential questions are the essence of the issue; they are broad, open-ended, guiding questions that provide the foundation or big ideas of a lesson; they frame effective instruction.
3.3. Essential questions help students understand the purpose or theme of the lesson, make connections between concepts or ideas, approach the answer in a variety of ways, expand their thinking, and guide inquiry and discussion.
4. What questions to ask?
4.1. Convergent questions involve straightforward, at times even literal, thinking and result in a singular answer. When involved in convergent thinking students consider material from a variety of sources to arrive at one "correct" or best possible answer. It emphasizes speed, accuracy, and logic. Most of the thinking that occurs in schools is convergent.
4.2. Divergent thinking involves examining a problem from a variety of perspectives and discovering possible solutions to a given problem. It helps students see and follow the evidence and reasoning that let to the original expert opinion. Divergent thinking is creative and it involves multiple solutions to problems; it is aimed at generating many diverse ideas about a topic in a short amount of time.
5. What makes a "good" question, "good"?
5.1. Usually, "good" questions are those that are clear, open ended, and thought provoking. They expand and challenge students comprehension of text(s) and knowledge, and involve them in analysis, evaluation, collaboration, and synthesis.
6. Why ask questions?
6.1. Questions play a very important role in facilitating comprehension. They can help students develop their schemata, promote better understanding, and increase motivation
6.2. It is also important that teachers ask questions that help students see relationships among ideas and concepts, and promote focused academic discussions in class.
6.2.1. Before: Questions asked before reading gives students purpose.
6.2.2. During: Questions generated by students while they read, facilitate comprehension of text.
6.2.3. After: Questions asked after reading can help monitor students' understanding of text and can also be used to challenge their thinking.
7. Student-generated Questions
7.1. Questions stimulate new ways of analyzing, evaluating, and thinking; they generate new questions
7.2. Self questioning shifts the control to the students; it gives them the responsibility to generate questions they could use to question others in class, to further discuss the topic, or questions they could raise about what they do not understand or would like to learn more about.
8. Questioning the author
8.1. Questioning the author (QtA) is an approach to comprehension instruction that is designed to meaningfully engage students with the text and help them construct meaning from the text.
8.2. QtA allows teachers to ask specific questions of students that will help them create meaning and reflect on the text while they read.
9. Question-Answer Relationships
9.1. Question-Answer Relationships (QAR) is a framework for helping students understand how to self question using different types of questions. QAR supports students' reading comprehension, teaches them how to ask questions about the text (and images), and where and how to locate answers to them, and promotes critical thinking skills and metacognition.
10. Complex Questions
10.1. Complex questions do not have just one answer; the answers cannot be easily located in a literal fashion in the text; they require lots of inferencing about the text (or across texts) and lots of reflecting about their understanding as it is filtered through their personal experiences.
11. Proficient readers
11.1. A student who has "good" or proficient comprehension is someone who uses existing knowledge to make sense of new information, asks questions about the text before, during, and after reading, draws inferences from text, monitors their own comprehension, uses fix-up strategies when meaning breaks down, determines what is important, and synthesizes information to create sensory images.
12. What does it mean to comprehend?
12.1. Reading is thinking; reading is an active process. Comprehension is a complex, interactive process of constructing meaning from text-in other words, reading, identifying important ideas, evaluating them, and applying them. It involves the reciprocal interaction of 3 factors- the reader, the text and the context in which the text is read.
13. What is the role of comprehension in College and beyond?
13.1. College, career, and workforce readiness and lifelong learning, involve both convergent and divergent learning. Creativity and learning require an interchange between convergent and divergent thinking.
13.1.1. The jobs that are growing today have two common characteristics: expert thinking and complex communication skills
13.1.2. Jobs require the ability to think deeply and carefully and solve new problems; Complex communication requires the ability to interpret information (from multiple sources and perspectives) to others in public relations, industry, technology, teaching, etc.