There Can Be More To a Question Than The Correct Answer
How might teaching and learning be different if we started with thinking like a geographer or thinking like a psychologist rather than identifying the content to cover?
AP teachers have a fantastic instructional tool available to them: AP Classroom. Cue the groans from some of you about how it regularly seems not to work, especially when you are giving a test, or how many clicks the simplest task can take. But some of us taught AP before there was AP Classroom, so we remember struggling to find or write good questions to use when assessing what students have learned. One thing I use AP Classroom for that I don’t see teachers talk about much is how the questions can be used as potential starting points for instruction, not just as tools for assessment.
Take two topic questions in AP Classroom about spatial patterns in the distribution of ethnic groups (Chinese, Malay, and Indian) in Singapore. One question assesses a student’s understanding of the learning objective for Unit One: Thinking Geographically, Topic Three: The Power of Geographic Data. Another assesses a student’s understanding of the learning objective for Unit One, Topic Four: Spatial Concepts. There is no back story to these questions, and a student can answer them correctly without knowing anything the 1964 riots between the Chinese and Malay communities, the Ethnic Integration Policy introduced in 1989, or the first Racial Harmony Day in 1997 to commemorate the 1964 riots.
Many teachers plan their lessons around the Course and Exam Description, often using a slide show someone else created and having students fill in “slotted notes” (a post for another day). They may not look at the AP Classroom questions until they're nearly finished teaching the unit, when they pull questions from the Question Bank to create a unit test. What if we reversed that sequence? What if, before planning a lesson on spatial concepts or language development, we looked at the questions students would eventually be asked to answer? Not just to identify what students need to know for the exam, but to consider what the questions might help us teach.
A student can answer the Singapore questions correctly without knowing anything about the 1964 riots, the Ethnic Integration Policy, or Racial Harmony Day. But a teacher who knows the back story - what inspired the geography expert to write those particular questions - sees an opportunity to move beyond identifying and describing spatial patterns toward investigating why those patterns exist, how they came to be, and what they reveal about the relationship between people, place, and public policy.
In AP Psychology, a question tagged to Unit Three: Development and Learning, Topic Five: Communication and Language Development asks students to apply the psychological process of learning to discriminate phonemes to a scenario about an infant living in a household of Japanese speakers. Reading this question led me to discover Patricia Kuhl’s TED talk “The Lingustic Genius of Babies,” which I use every year when teaching language development. The lesson hook, “Helpless” in Japanese, is a fun introduction to talking about communication and language development although there’s admittendly nothing in the video that helps students master essential knowledge in the CED beyond getting them interested in the day’s topic. The definition of phonemes is spiced up by listening to all 100 phonemes in Taa, the language thought to have the most phonemes in the world, before we move on to morphemes, syntax (image on post preview page - order of adjectives in English), and the stages of language development. Kuhl's TED Talk brings these concepts together through research on how infants' exposure to language shapes their ability to discriminate speech sounds. Her discussion of research involving American and Taiwanese infants gives us an opportunity to explore how experience influences language development and how researchers investigate developmental changes in perception. The AP Classroom question prompted me to explore the psychology behind the question and find a way to bring the concepts to life for my students. Students demonstrate that they are learning to think like psychologists by providing evidence to evaluate a claim about when language instruction should begin in school.
Teachers want our lessons to be engaging. But how can they also make our discipline’s way of understanding the world more visible to students?
I have way more questions than answers. I'm still learning after 31 years in the classroom. So here's what I'm wondering: When you plan a lesson, where do you start?
