‘How did you figure that out?’
This question is probably the one I ask the most whenever I’m working with children. (Some people who aren’t children get irritated when I ask it. They take it as a sign that there is a flaw in their thinking. But usually, I’m just curious.) Today I ran across a passage from Choice Words, by Peter H. Johnston, that explains much better than I could how this question prompts children to assert their intellectual agency — the sense that “I am a person who does math,” for instance. This sense of agency is a powerful factor in students’ long-term success.
The question insists that a child respond with something like, ‘First I tried to …’ In other words, it requires the student to position himself as a story teller with himself as the protagonist in the story. ….Such a narrative invites a sense of agency as part of the child’s literate [or mathematical or insert-what-you-wish] identity.
This ‘how did you’ invitation to an agentive role is particularly important. We hear a lot about teaching children strategies, but we often encounter classrooms in which children are being taught strategies yet are not being strategic… Teaching children strategies results in them knowing strategies, but not necessarily in their acting strategically and having a sense of agency. …. Teaching for strategies requires setting children up to generate strategies, then reviewing with them, in an agentive retelling, the effectiveness of the strategies they generated, as in, ‘You figured out that tricky word by yourself. How did you do that?’ As children do this, they are in control of the problem-solving process and are asked to consciously recognize that control in an agentive narrative. (p. 31)
Don’t underestimate the power of the cumulative effects of asking this question of all of your students, as often as possible. The story of Billy, a first grader, illustrates it well.
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