Student-Centered Learning by Design
Course
The Five Whys [8:12]
- Learn about the 5 Whys and how it helps student researchers understand their topic
- Learn to develop a problem statement using How might we… questions
- Learn to empower student researchers with authentic research
So this is a screenshot of a document where students, are screenshots from a document, where students did this and the student was validating the problem and writing about what will happen if nothing is done to solve the problem. She was asked a question that starts with Why? by another student and then responded to that student's Why question, even providing some links to other places, where are, to the places where she's getting the information to answer this Why question. The questioner then follows up with another question and the problem solver answers. And we go back and forth until the questioner has asked a Why question 5 times. Now, we're pretty confident that this student researcher has really dug deep into that problem and authentically understands it. And it's held up under the scrutiny of one of the classroom peers. So it's a really powerful and potent way to get students to support each other's inquiry in a way that really deepens the process for both of them.
And from that 5 Whys, we now start to develop a problem statement—I now understand who my stakeholder is, I understand what their unmet need is because I've derived this insight about them. and the problem from the research that I've done. I'm also able to lever, I'm also able to identify what the resources are that I can leverage in solving the problem and the insights that I now have derived about my stakeholder, what they like, what they're good at, what their hopes and aspirations and wishes are. Which means I can now build a How might we... question and this is a different way of understanding a research question and How might we... is a very common design question stem and it's worth unpacking those three words. How is problem-solving and optimistic at its core; Might means we're staying open to all sorts of possibilities, not just the things we know we already know how to do; and We means it's collaborative by nature. I'm not doing this alone, this takes a team. And I always come back to that Thomas Panek story. How might we... governed everything that team of designers did in collaboration with Thomas Panek, their stakeholder and by extension, other people whose sight was compromised, who wanted that same liberation that Thomas was seeking?
So for our purposes, How might we... might look like this? How might we build real world experiences in order to increase student investment in their learning? Or how might we nurture an inquiry stance in order to help students be lifelong learners? Or how might we prioritize equity in order to ensure all students are self-actualized and validated? These can be the questions that govern how we approach our unit planning, lesson planning, curriculum writing, collaborative partnerships with classroom colleagues.
And so I come to something that George Couros wrote in his book, Innovate Inside the Box, that came out several years ago, where he said, "I encourage people to quit saying we are developing the leaders of tomorrow. Those words imply that students can't make a difference until they are out of school, which is simply not true." And it is that spirit that informed a project I want to share with you called "Acting Civilized." And this is a unit that I worked on with a when I was in the library in a high school teaching with a social studies colleague in his ninth grade social studies class. So Acting Civilized was the name of the unit and these are exactly the teacher's words on the document that he provided students to explain what they were going to be doing. He said to them first, we have studied what it means to be civilized, how we can conceptualize progress, and we have discussed how morality fits into both of these concepts. So he's already pushing ninth graders to do some really heavy, heavy intellectual lifting. He then went on and said, we know problems exist, yet everyday we live lives that benefit from inequalities, and we are relatively indifferent to that fact. The time has come to make a change and take action. Your group's task is to select and study a modern problem in need of action that exists in our world, and he then went and used all the protocols that you have all just practice together. And the goal then is that you're going to research and determine the roots of this problem, the reason for the continued existence of this problem, who benefits, and who is hurt? And now here's the crux. Then you will design a response to this situation, beginning with one local action, you can and will take. And this is how he framed the unit project for his students in a ninth grade world history course. And so he took these global historical, they were looking at Renaissance era Medieval into Renaissance era history, and made it real and actionable for the students in his classroom.
So students to be successful here had to be authentically engaged in meaningful research and inquiry in order to validate the problem, understand and empathize with stakeholders and begin to attempt solutions, they had to act meaningfully in their communities to begin to rise to his call to action and embedded all through this was a reflection on their learning experience, but also on their place in their community. And it was the beginning of seeing themselves as having, as being interdependent with people around them and not focusing solely on their own, perhaps needs or aspirations. What it required of us as educators was we had to meet our expectations, right? These are ninth graders. This was this was maybe about a third of the way into the year that we were doing this. And as the year went on, the students became better and better and better at it, because we kept challenging them to do this work. We had to scaffold the work for them to begin. We turned over agency to them as the year went on. But this was our authentic starting point. And then there was a paradigm shift for us in thinking about, well, what didn't go well with this unit because we're going to do this again in the next unit. So how do we better prepare to meet the students' needs and bring them into that conversation about what those needs are?
In this lesson, we learn about using the 5 Whys to validate a problem. This collaborative question and answer session ensures that the student truly understands what they are researching.
Using page 11 of the Course Packet included in the Resources above, come up with 5 why questions for a recent research project that you have completed with your students or have a colleague challenge you with 5 why questions about a problem that you are both familiar with. Using this questioning technique will put a truer understanding of any problem you are facing and will strengthen your research process.
MLA Citation
Whiting, Jacquelyn. "Student-Centered Learning by Design: Developing a Problem Statement." School Library Connection, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267094?learningModuleId=2267090&topicCenterId=2247903.
Entry ID: 2267710
Additional Resources
About the Author
MLA Citation
Whiting, Jacquelyn. "Student-Centered Learning by Design. The Five Whys [8:12]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267094?learningModuleId=2267090&topicCenterId=2247903.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267094?learningModuleId=2267090&topicCenterId=2247903
Entry ID: 2267094