What Are You Asking?

It’s not Duck Season! It’s not Wabbit Season!

It’s almost Testing Season! The time of year when schedules get crazy and your pacing goes out the window!

One of my least favorite things about testing season is the post-game talk of the students. After the test is over, despite the fact that they swear that they won’t talk about it, they of course DO talk about it.

So they come in my class after a three-hour testing block and the kids start talking about the test. And invariably, some kid will talk about something and some other kid will say “holy $#@!! Is that what that part was about? I totally thought it was asking about blahblahblah”

Aha. Here lies the problem. It happens on my classroom assessments, in district assessments, on the FSA, SAT, ACT, ASFAB, GED, GRE, and any other alphabet-soup of a test.

Kids don’t understand what the question is asking for.

For example, the question asks kids to analyze, but they describe. Or it asks them to contrast but the kids compare.

I’d like to propose that over the next couple of weeks, as we get closer to testing season, that we explicitly teach what those “power words” are and what they mean and what a kid should do if given that word in a test.

It depends on where you take your words from, but the internet (which, I know, I know, is NOT the authority of everything) often uses the “12 Power Words”.

Every teacher does NOT have to teach every one of these words.

But when they come up in your class over the next few weeks (and they should come up frequently), STOP! And explicitly teach the word.  (Honestly, if your class is not tackling at least SOME of those words, then your class is not hitting a lot of higher order thinking.)

It shouldn’t take a lot of time. A couple of minutes, at most. Which is worth it if your kids are mastering Tier Two Vocab.

What do I mean by teaching it explicitly?

1. Well, when that word comes up in an assignment or assessment or whatever, I will stop the class and see how many students can define the term with their shoulder partner.
2. Then (because kids will so often tell us that they understand things when they don’t) I will either solicit a few student definitions or give them my own.
3. I will have the kids practice  their acquisition of the term by having them do a turn and talk where each partner uses the word in a real sentence about anything they want. We will share those out, too.
4. I will have each team practice using the term by making a content-related question.
5. We will talk about the type of answer the question (the one we began with) is asking for. Is the question asking for you to compare? What would a compare answer look like?

For example: Based on the document, infer the author’s point of view.  

1. Turn to your partner and see if you can explain what “infer” means! Who wants to share  with the class?
2. Student A had a great definition! Infer means to get something out of words that isn’t “right there”!
3. Turn to your partner and use the word “infer” about something in your life. Mine is “I can infer from the fact that you’re not answering my texts that you don’t want to talk to me”.
4. Now, use the term “infer” about something regarding the Treaty of Versailles. “I can infer from the fact that Germany has to pay a bijillion dollars, that it’s kind of a punishment”
5. Now, what would an “infer” answer look like? It should include us getting something out of the document/text/cartoon/whatever that isn’t “right there”.

How do you teach the “power words”? What steps do you take? How can you really hammer this home in the next few weeks?