Questioning

The Ped Packs, Unit 7 has a great deal of useful information on the importance of questioning in lessons. Summarized below are some of the main areas.



Engaging the whole class with questioning

When using questions with a whole class, ensure that your sequence of lessons does not go on for too long as you risk losing some students’ attention. Ensure that you provide wait time to allow students time to think. Allow time for students to discuss answers first before coming back together as a whole class as this will allow less confident students to discuss responses in advance. Avoid allowing certain well-motivated students to dominate by enforcing a ‘no-hands’ rule, which gives you the freedom to choose at whom to direct your questions.



Making questioning effective

Allow students to feel safe to make mistakes. It’s acceptable to tell students their response is wrong and make them feel better by using a positive such as, ‘Although I you are wrong, thank you for responding. I can see how you might think that.’ If the response is partly right, acknowledge which parts are correct and then use prompts to deal with incorrect prompts.

Probing questions are used as follow-ups from the original question and can be used to elicit more information, to clarify responses or extend student responses, eg ‘can you tell me more about that? Why do you think that?’

Placing a minimum requirement on a student’s answer to a question will begin to produce longer responses. It may also help boys’ responses as they enjoy competition. For example, you could say ‘do not answer this question in less than 15 words’.

Closed questions can be used to check factual understanding and recall (what is the next number in the sequence?) and an open question can be used as a follow-up to extend student thinking (how did you work that out?)

Also, remember students need to ask questions as well!



Planning sequences of questions to promote thinking

Bloom’s Taxonomy is useful in planning a series of questions during lessons. There is a comprehensive table linking the cognitive objective (such as knowledge, comprehension, application etc) to possible sentence stems on page 13 of the Ped Pack Unit 1. For example, if you want students to process the knowledge they already have, look up comprehension in the table and you will find question stems such as ‘how do you think …?, what happens when …?’

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