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Question
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.
You can tell whether he is wise by his questions.Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz
Questions are really the essence of evidence-driven decision making. To make good decisions you need to start with very good questions.
A very good question will be:
- specific and with a clear purpose
- able to be investigated through looking at data and other evidence
- likely to lead to information on which you can act.
It’s worth spending some time turning good questions into very good questions.
For example, a school asked:
What do we know about reported bullying incidents for year 10 students?
This question can be answered quite easily, but what use will the answer be? After more consideration, they asked questions like:
Who has been bullying whom? Where?
What are students telling us?
What does pastoral care data tell us? Were some interventions more effective with some groups of students than others?
More purposeful questions are likely to lead to information you can act on. Some more examples:
Initial question:
What are the attendance rates for year 11 students?
More purposeful questions:
How do year 11 attendance rates compare with other year levels? Do any identifiable groups of year 11 students attend less regularly than average?
Initial question:
What has been the effect of the new 6-day x 50-min period structure?
More purposeful questions:
Is the new 6-day x 50-min period structure having any positive effect on student engagement levels? Is it influencing attendance patterns? What do students say?
Initial question:
How well are boys performing in formal writing in year 9?
More purposeful questions:
Should we be concerned about boys’ writing? If so, what action should we be taking to improve the writing of boys in terms of the literacy requirements for NCEA Level 1?
Initial question:
What has been the effect of shifting the lunch break to after period 4?
More purposeful questions:
The new timing of the lunch break was intended to improve student engagement levels after lunch. Did it achieve this? If so, did improvements in engagement improve achievement? Do the benefits outweigh any disadvantages?