What Would Happen If…You Didn’t Answer the Question?
Written by: Christy White
“You are not the only giver of knowledge,” she said.
Let me add a little context to that statement. About 8 years ago, I was meeting with my principal and discussing how my students sometimes had so many questions about things that we got stuck in our learning, and I got frustrated with answering them all. Believe me, I am not complaining that my students had questions; it was just that I wanted them to talk to each other and have discussions, not just talk to me and ask me all the questions. That’s when my principal said, “You are not the only giver of knowledge,” and this opened my quest to shift my language, as a teacher, in a way that reframed me as a facilitator of student talk and learning.
My most powerful takeaway from my shift in teacher language became the phrase, “I’m not sure, what do you think?” At first, students would take a puzzled pause, and then either talk me through their thinking or continue with their question. I supported them with prompts of knowledge, “I wonder…” statements, or by asking them guiding questions, but I would put the cognitive load on them to do the thinking and the figuring out of the answer. I also sometimes asked them if they knew of anyone else in class who might be able to help them with their question. This encouraged them to seek out and talk with their peers. A way that I would initially set students up to go to peers with their questions was during whole-group discussions. I would model how to ask and listen to others by restating the question to the class and simply asking, “Does anyone have any ideas?” This kept the whole class in the conversation and encouraged them to offer possibilities based on what they know. I continued with taking a passive role and providing prompting or other questions to guide them in their thinking. Sometimes I needed to summarize or restate the information to provide clarity of the answer and ensure everyone understood.
“I’m not sure, what do you think?”
Circling back to that statement from my principal, you may wonder where it came from and what she meant. She directed me to reread the book Choice Words by Peter H. Johnston. She knew I had read this book before, and upon my second reading, I was now ready to take action on these thoughts and ideas about teaching. In his book, Johnston says “we cannot persistently ask questions of children without becoming the one-who-asks-questions and placing children in the position of one-who-answers-questions,” but this is also true in the opposite with students thinking only teachers know all the answers (Johnston, 2004, pg. 6). He further states that schools naturally imply to students that the teacher is “the giver of knowledge… with the students as receivers of knowledge,” and therefore positions the teacher as the judge and the students as competitors, instead of all of the people in the classroom being knowledge givers and receivers, thus creating a collaborative learning environment that highlights that we all have unique information to bring to the table and that it is okay to not know something that someone else knows (Johnston, 2004, pg. 9).
I acknowledge that this book is not a current publication, but much of the guidance to teachers and how to support students in their use of language continues to ring true, and I continue to return to this text when reflecting on my teaching and when working with other teachers. Chapter 2, titled “Noticing and Naming,” is where I focused a lot of my energy and attention in my learning and growth. As a Kindergarten teacher, I often had to talk to students about their learning because they could not yet express themselves and their knowledge in a written format. Sometimes it was hard to get students to open up and tell me about things they had written or drawn or even how they solved a problem, but there was progress once I started using some of Johsnton’s phrases, such as: “I see you ____,” or “I heard you say ____,” or even “I wonder what you ______,” paired with “can you tell me more about that?” I noticed that students felt more seen and heard and were then eager to talk about their work and their learning because it felt safe and not judgmental, or like they were being tested, and it let them know that their voice and ideas mattered. The more I used these phrases, the more I also heard students start to use these phrases when working with their peers – my language frame gave them the words to start a conversation.
“It let them know that their voice and ideas mattered.”
I also noticed that my students started shifting their beliefs about the words “I don’t know.” These were no longer just default responses; they were opportunities to find out something new. When I first started responding with “I’m not sure, what do you think?” my students were confused, because I was the adult and they were in Kindergarten. How could I possibly not know the answer to their questions? But in this language shift, I not only showed that I valued their opinion, AND that they almost always already had the knowledge they needed to answer their question, but I also made it okay to NOT know something and showed them how to find answers. This connected me more with Chapters 4 and 6 of Johnston’s book about student agency and knowing. Other phrases that I modeled for students were “let’s find out,” “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” “I think I need to think more about that,” or even “how do you think we can find an answer?”
I hear teachers frequently say their students aren’t engaging in discussion, they’re not asking each other questions, and they’re not getting into higher-order thinking. Some common terms used today that align with the language shifts I made are monologic and dialogic dialogue, or discourse. The traditional teacher-student response is a monologic discourse and continues the narrative that we, as teachers, have all the answers. The switch to dialogic dialogue in your classroom “engages students in speaking, listening to, and questioning one another,” which leads to “a synthesis of ideas where the whole is greater than the sum” (Walsh 2021, p.100). Nicholas Burbules (1993) states, “dialogue represents a continuous, developmental communicative interchange through which we stand to gain a fuller apprehension of the world, ourselves, and one another,” which is what many adults do in their daily lives, so why can’t we start better embedding this process at the beginning of the learning journey?
In my teaching experience, I believe that not only CAN young kids take on this challenge for this type of thinking and speaking, but that starting in Kindergarten, where everyone is learning and making mistakes, is crucial due to their eagerness to learn and their naturally open mindset about learning new things and taking risks. The book Strive for Five Conversations focuses on early learners, starting in preschool, with teachers guiding students through 5 exchanges of dialogue. This text focuses on the back and forth that people have in a conversation, and that just because a question was answered does not mean the conversation is done. Zucker and Cabell discuss the importance of oral language, where to scaffold up or down, and how to make the transition to academic focused language as students move into primary grades. This book also acknowledges the many benefits these language shifts have on multi-lingual learners because students talking to and with their peers provides more access and opportunities for these learners to be exposed to and practice the English language in a low-stress environment.
For the past 18 months, I have stepped out of the classroom and into a leadership role in which I support several different elementary schools’ literacy coaches working with students and teachers in grades K through 3. In this role, I may be in classrooms every day, but I don’t always get the chance to interact with students. Just the other day I was fortunate enough to spend time in my favorite grade, Kindergarten, during small group instruction. I was able to sit with a few students working with manipulative letters. One of the students asked me how to spell several different words, and each time I said to him, “I’m not sure, what letter do you think are in [the words he had said]?” Each time he said he didn’t know, moved some letters around and asked me if he had made a word or not before coming up with a different word he wanted me to tell him the spelling of. After about 4-5 exchanges, he said to me, “Didn’t you go to school?” and gave me a questioning look, as to why I didn’t know how to spell anything. I had a little chuckle to myself and told him yes, that I did actually know how to spell the words he had asked about, but that I was trying to help him think about how to stretch the words out and figure out the letters on his own to help him learn how to spell them. I later reflected that help in spelling words is a common request in primary classrooms, and most every teacher I’ve seen will guide students through sounding the word out rather than spelling it for them, and that this might be the analogy needed for teachers to wrap their thinking around changing their language and responses to students during other times of the day.
I challenge you to think about YOU not being the only giver of knowledge in your classroom. Check out some of the authors I’ve shared that helped me, or set out on your own quest for more information.
Resources
- Burbules, N. (1993) Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice (Advances in Contemporary Educational Thought Series), Teachers College Press
- Johnston, P. (2004) Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning First Edition, Routledge
- Second Edition released 2024 by Routledge
- Walsh, J. (2021) Empowering Students as Questioners: Skills, Strategies, and Structures to Realize the Potential of Every Learner, Corwin: A SAGE Publishing Company
- Zucker, T. & Cabell S. (2024) Strive for Five Conversations: A Framework That Gets Kids Talking to Accelerate Their Language Comprehension and Literacy, Scholastic Professional
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