Doug Lemov's field notes

Thanks to everyone who came to our Ratio workshop in Albany yesterday.  As always we were honored to work with you and learned a lot.  And as always we didn’t have time to talk about everything you might want to talk about.  We promised you a link to share the idea of Question Delegation, which I discuss in Teach Like a Champion 2.0.  Here’s a brief discussion of the idea:

One tool for boosting Think Ratio is question delegation, which allows students to determine the topic and/or decide what’s important to discuss. For example, Gillian Cartwright of Uncommon High School in Brooklyn recently asked her students to read a long section of Fences by August Wilson and then identify specific passages from the text that they thought were “worthy of analysis.” Cartwright’s students read and took notes for eight minutes, noting key points that they thought fit that criterion. Then they discussed, with Cartwright asking, “So what did you think was worthy of analysis?” and students answering, roughly, “I thought this scene was worthy of analysis because …”

Another productive tool that facilitates question delegation is having students write discussion questions. For example, you could ask students to submit a rigorous discussion question in advance, perhaps as homework; then you would select a few that were especially rigorous or insightful to offer to the class: “OK, let’s take a minute to discuss some of your questions. One of you wanted to discuss Troy’s anger and whether it was changing in a permanent way.”

You could also have students frame discussion questions as part of a Do Now. This would cause students to be thinking about the discussion they’d have later as they were participating throughout class. Your selection of questions would, over time, intimate to students a great deal about what a quality question looks like, even while giving them the autonomy to write them themselves.

One reason why question delegation is important is because students often become familiar with having questions, assignments, and paper topics given to them. But most of the time in college, and often in high school, students must not only decide what to say about a topic but also, even before the rigorous analysis begins, decide what is “worthy of analysis.” Doing that well is often half the paper, one could argue. Deciding what’s worth talking about is an important skill to practice. Question delegation lets students do that in a strategic, defined, and efficient manner.

Gillian Cartwright, Question Delegation