Blog Post #6

ASKING QUESTIONS...

In order to be effective teachers, we need to consider the kinds of questions we ask our students. Asking questions to our students is very important because questions improve learning. The author of the resource"Three Ways to Ask Better Questions" says, "good questions make students think, they encourage participation, and I think they improve the caliber of the answers students give and the questions they ask." I couldn't agree more! After reading and researching about how to ask questions I have learned that asking questions that are most effective to students is more complex than I originally thought.

The author from "Three Ways to Ask Better Questions" says, "To achieve worthwhile outcomes more regularly, they're three actions we can take as teachers that have the potential to improve our questions." The first action we should take as teachers to improve our questioning is to prepare questions. When we write out questions we can make it clearer and not just the wording but also clearer conceptually. We can ask ourselves "is it the question that needs to be asked?" And we can also ask ourselves "when is it the best time to ask this question?" The second action is to play with questions. "Playing with the question means leaving it unanswered for a while and using some strategies to encourage students to think about it." A way we can put this into practice is by encouraging our students to write specific questions in their notes. Maybe ask a question at the beginning of the lesson and leave it unanswered until the lesson is almost over. The last action we should take as teachers to improve our questioning is to, preserve good questions. Good questions can be kept! After teaching a lesson, we can take brief notes on which questions were the most effective at achieving the goals we had set out and which questions led to answers we were not expecting.

"We should be working on our questioning techniques but not just because our questions are more effective when skillfully used." We need to ask good questions so that students see the importance of questions and how they make us think and help us learn (Three Ways to Ask Better Questions).

The resource "Asking Questions to Improve Learning" lists a few general strategies that can help guide our questions to be ones that have a greater effect on our students. The first general strategy for asking questions is when we are planing questions, we need to keep in mind our course goals. "For example, do we want our students to master core concepts or do we want to develop their critical thinking skills?" A second strategy is "avoid asking leading questions, which are phrased in such a way that it suggests its own answer which then discourages students from thinking on their own." A few more strategies include; "follow a yes-or-no questions with an additional questions, aim for direct, clear, and specific questions, and when you plan each class session, include notes of when you will pause to ask and answer questions." "Asking questions throughout the class will make the class more interactive as well as help us measure and improve student learning."

Another thing we need to know in order to be effective teachers, is we need to understand the goal of questioning. I love how Ben Johnson, the author of the resource "The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom," says "as teachers, we need to come to grips with the fact that we really do not know everything, and there is no reason to assume that the students know nothing." He says but perhaps the most important question to ask is, "what does a teacher asking questions of a class expect the class to learn form the questioning process?" Asking the question "does everybody understand?" is a useless question. This resource says "even though we all realize that students not answering- or even answering in the affirmative- may not really understand, we still ask it." When we ask this kind of question we really end up telling our students "Ok, here is your last chance. If you don't ask any questions, then you understand completely, and I am free to go on to the next subject. Because I asked this fair question, and gave you a fair chance to answer, I am absolved from any lack of understanding on your part." However, the problem with this thinking is that "sometimes our students do not understand that they do not understand, and if they do not know what they do not know, there is no way that they can ask a question about it." Also when teachers ask a yes-or-no question, sometimes children just might give the answer the teacher wants to hear.

When a teacher starts "pacing the room and stops to ask a question, if the students know that the question will be open to the entire class, then most likely two-thirds of the class will not even pay it any attention and will continue to doodle or daydream. To ask questions the right way teachers need to use a simple yet effective approach. Teachers should simply ask a question, pause for at least three seconds, and then say a student's name. "By doing this, all the students will automatically be thinking about an answer and only after another child's name is said will they sigh in relief because they were not chosen. Asking questions in random is also a way to get the children to focus and use their thinking skills. If asking questions is not random "then once they answer a question, think think they have answered their question and are done for the day.