As a teacher candidate at West Virginia State University, I deeply understand the varieties of questioning strategies that connect students' metacognitive thinking across multiple levels of the Depth of Knowledge and how to use the DoK during instruction for meaningful discussion. To display my strengths, I wish to showcase three videos from my Day Two lesson of my "Variations of Traits" unit plan that shows DoK 1, DoK 2, DoK 3, and the beginnings of DoK 4. In each video, I will describe the interactions between the students, what went well, and what works among the DoK. I emphasize ensuring students' comprehension of the vocabulary, especially in this lesson, where some of the vocabulary was above their comprehension; I needed to use terms they could understand for specific words. I corrected this by day three; in my first video, you can see one third-grade student trying to read the word "characteristics" from the screen, and this is amazing; she did very well, but I was not teaching reading, the point is to know what the characteristics are, and what that means, so I went in-depth in these discussion videos asking for connections for examples to put meanings behind the vocabulary. Hence, the term's big words in the definition is not the focus; it is learning what the word means in real-world scenarios.  

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The first video begins the Day Two lesson, and I started by asking what a 'trait' is. This is a DoK level one, defining and reproducing the terms meaning by results. Once several students spoke out of turn, this was an open discussion, but the class engagement was focused. There was a misconception of the meaning at first, and then mispronunciation, which I corrected and described; yes, the boy's answer was an example of a trait (another one of our vocabulary words), but it is not the meaning of the trait. I had to dig deeper and press for examples, which hit level two DOK, and a boy produced color traits of our plant in a real-world example from our classroom! This triggers metacognitive thinking in the girl trying to piece together what traits are, and she connects that in a nearly confident voice, "They are the types of traits they have." Then I finished with the full definition for comprehension and reconfirmed with another student with their interactions that, yes, the traits can be inherited and that his contributions were not incorrect; it was just not complete. 

 

In the following video, I ask students, "I want you all to ask yourselves, what do I want to learn from this entire experiment?" This is our guiding question to help formulate our hypothesis. I gave multiple examples, "What would happen if we did not water our plants?" we can ask ourselves, "What would happen if our plant receives no sunlight?" Our students are doing these experiments! Students are working in collaborative groups to develop an experiment with their group's three plants. This video shows a DOK level three, following the students and asking questions as to why reasons may happen to our plants in our experiment, but this does eventually turn into DOK level 4 when these questions turn into a hypothesis, which turns into an experiment over time that the students develop and monitors. The questions we are creating now are fundamental to the experiment and are at a higher level DOK, and drive home more questions by the time we finish the experiment. I reinforced to the students that the questions do not have to come from the screen; they can develop them on their own; this way, I can help differentiate this lesson for the students who have not been able to create the concepts at a higher DOK, and I will see this on the paper for those that did use my example as a formative assessment.

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The last video shows a DOK level three. I am asking students to "think in patterns," I am teaching students a system to sort and distinguish similarities from differences with rationale. This discussion went very well using puppies because students gave individual examples of parts of dogs that would classify the schema of what they know to be a dog! This video is the perfect example of showcasing the ideals of  Jean Piaget and his ideals on schema and assimilation. Students recognize these traits of dogs because they were told and knew these are dogs. Still, now that we are using new information, we are breaking down small individual differences and similarities between the animals or plants to make educated guesses and determine if it is what we believe it to be. Students' new assimilation is the latest information about that animal. For example, showing students information about the genes and pictures of dogs that are dapple or multiple colors, which are traits passed from inheritance, has given them new information about how they can understand that the dogs are still the same breed; this is assimilation. In this discussion, we are determining how to classify similar traits from different ones. Some have the same fur size but different colors, but that doesn't mean they are different breeds. This is a DOK level three strategic thinking discussion, which leads one student to link that the dogs "inherited" the traits (McLeod, 2024).