Student engagement fluctuates for a variety of reasons, some of the most difficult to control being personal, which often leads to greater barriers to entry. We can think about personal barriers to entry as any internal or external factor impacting a student’s access to a lesson, often beyond the teacher’s control. These might include who a student sits next to in class, events that happened in their previous class, how outgoing a student may be, or what time they were able to go to bed the night before. While we cannot guarantee a full eight hours for each of our students, there is one area of our instruction that we can control: our use of questions.
A good question is the hook for a lesson, it is the first stroke of our pen in the blueprint we outline for our students. A thought-provoking question has the potential to engage students and draw them into a lesson so long as it is approachable, creates a sense of urgency, and is relatable. Offering a question that students want to answer for themselves or sheds light on other areas of their life generates buy-in and strengthens the teacher-student relationship as students begin to trust that teachers will engage them in meaningful work, ultimately lowering barriers.
Now, this idea sounds well and good, but what does this look like in practice? Let’s examine a BBI stack from the C3 Teachers website about government trust, which centers around the looping question, “How do breaches of trust affect public perception?” This stack includes blueprints that address the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the Iran-Contra Affair. In isolation, these events are complicated and multi-faceted, but threading them together through a compelling question simplifies that entry point through an intriguing relatable question. The query itself contains two parts: breaches of trust and public perception. Students conceptualize breaches of trust through their personal relationships and observe public perception through all kinds of daily interactions from social media to politics. The question highlights an idea that is approachable to students, relevant to their lives and is applicable beyond the lesson’s content while simultaneously drawing parallels between events, ultimately lowering the barrier to entry.
The second blueprint in this stack demonstrates the approach particularly well using artifacts related to Watergate. We know that details surrounding the Watergate scandal are web-like and expanded across all branches of government over several years. Instead of unravelling the complicated web, the author leans on the main ideas and the compelling question to illustrate the point. The instructional choice here is wise.
Rather than reading a lengthy excerpt, recording tedious notes, or watching a documentary on the events of Watergate, the instructor tasks students with interpreting political cartoons from the 1970s and analyzing how Nixon’s portrayal evolved over time. This approach provides meaningful context to the events surrounding the scandal and answers the compelling question using the themes illustrating breaches of trust in the cartoons. While the lesson is clearly contextual around Watergate, an event from half a century ago, the compelling question is broad enough to offer a foothold for students to vault the barrier to entry as teachers trust students to grapple with important questions and start making their own modern connections.
