Challenged to create a game to engage students in the questioning process, my peers Anne H, Bethany K and I invented DQ! Here’s a video of the game our game is structured off of, Pterodactyl:
DQ*: The Game
Objective: Students begin brainstorming and thinking in questions about various topics.
How to Play: Students stand in a circle.
One student begins with sharing a topic.
(Teachers can constrain this to their subject matter or particular unit or leave it broad)
The student to the topic-sharer’s left asks a question starting with “Who”
The student to their left asks a question relating to the topic starting with “What”
This continues around in a circle, through the question leads of this diagram (including 5 Why questions) until after the last “Why” question the next student starts a new topic.
Students can reverse the direction of the question circle by shrugging their shoulders.
How students get out:
If they shrug their shoulders to reverse the circle more than once a game
If they go out of order of the question starters on the diagram
If they laugh
If they say a statement
The game continues until there is one person left!
I’m SO excited to play this with my students. This can be a fun way to get students to generate their own questions about a topic before we dive into a new unit or a way to extend a lesson.
I’m thinking I might use this in my Ancient Egypt unit. All topics have to do with Ancient Egypt and students need to write down one question they said or was said by someone else that was interesting to them. The next day it will be their bell work/do now to explore that question.
Why is this game valuable? I’ve been recently reading A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger (2014) and learning about “the critical role questioning plays in enabling people to innovate, solve problems, and move ahead in their careers and lives.” (p.1) Questioning is so important and I want students to have multiple opportunities to develop that skill in my class because of its value to their futures.
I want to be critical of who is entitled to ask questions in my class and of the way “questions [are] often used by teachers primarily to check up on students, rather than to try and spark interest..” (Berger, 2014, p. 56) But in order to do this, I must be “willing to give up control to allow for more questioning” in my classroom. (Berger, 2014, p. 6) It’s challenge to have students questioning more but it’s one worth exploring
The five whys at the end are inspired by a methodology shared in the Berger’s (2014) book:
“The five why methodology originated in Japan and is credited to Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. For decades, the company used the practice of asking why five times in succession as a means of getting to the root of a particular manufacturing problem.” (p. 93)
Asking why so many times is a way of tapping into that questioning we see in young children, the one that keeps diving deeper to get to deeper truth and understanding. I’d love for students to feel free to ask questions, particularly why, in my class. Sometimes for middle schoolers, anything that smells a bit like childhood or young children is rejected as a way of trying to craft their own mature identity. By sneaking it into this game, I hope to make it fun to question. That making their own questions can be enjoyable, even in the ways it mirrors childlike questioning.
I want to be conscious that “we often fail to see all the possibilities available to us because we simply haven’t spent enough time looking.” (Berger, 2014, p. 87) I think about how valuable a game like this could be towards the end of a unit in my World History classroom. As we wrap up our time in Early China and are exploring the Silk Road - playing this game with the constraints that topics relate to class material can push students to see that there’s so much more to the topic than what we covered in class. Generating their own questions will help motivate them to continue their exploration of the topic after the unit wraps.
I believe that “questioning is a classic case of the more you do it, the easier it gets” so I want to bake into my lesson plans more opportunities for students to inquire and generate questions. (Berger, 2014, p. 187) This game especially in the way it circles back again and again to the same question stems gives students a lot of practice generating questions. The pressure to not replicate a peer’s question in the “why” section in particular will stretch students beyond their typical questions.
Try this game out! Let me know how it goes!
As we play this game as a class I might modify certain aspects - like the why questions need to build off of each other or that a student scribe writes all the questions that are said. I’ll likely add some constraints like we cannot make anyone in the room a “topic” or ask questions that are unkind to others.
I’m curious to see, what might happen if we get students generating more of their own questions in class?
*(You might be asking why it's called DQ. That's a super valuable question and part of the reason why it has it's name - to get gears turning and asking questions. The answers vary - maybe it's Deeper Questions, Digging for Questions or maybe we just simply were hungry to a soft dairy desert - you decide!)
Sources: Berger, W. (2014). A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough
ideas. Bloomsbury USA.
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