Mobilise Project

Questions Relating to the New Learning ‘Educational Leadership – Questioning for Learning’ p.30-35; CrisTovani

PLC5

Classroom Questioning (Kathleen Cotton)

The Socratic method of using questions and answers to challenge assumptions, expose contradictions, and lead to new knowledge and wisdom is an undeniably powerful teaching approach.

Questioning is widely used as a contemporary teaching technique with teachers spending anywhere from 35 – 50% of their instructional time conducting questions.

  • What is a question?
  • What are the purposes of teachers’ classroom questions?
  • Should we be asking questions which require literal recall of text content and only very basic reasoning?
  • Should we be posing questions which call for speculative, inferential and evaluative thinking?

Consider:

How and why do we use questions and talk in the classroom?

Teachers use questioning as part of their teaching for many reasons, but often to:

maintain the flow of the learning within the lesson;

engage students with the learning;

assess what has been learned, and check that what has been learnt is understood

andapplied;

test student memory and comprehension;

to initiate individual and collaborative thinking in response to new information;

seek the views and opinions of pupils;

provide an opportunity for pupils to share their opinions/views, seeking responses

from their peers;

encourage creative thought and imaginative or innovative thinking;

foster speculation, hypothesis and idea/opinion forming;

create a sense of shared learning and avoid the feel of a ‘lecture’;

challenge the level of thinking and possibly mark a change to a higher order of

thinking;

model higher order thinking using examples and building on the responses of students.

Discuss:

“…ask a higher level question, get a higher level answer….”

Questions to consider and how these relate to your own setting:

  1. Do all your members of staff know what ‘critical thinking’ is?
  2. How can you encourage awe and wonder beyond EYFS?
  3. How often do you ask children to suggest questions? Does this only happen at the start of a new unit/topic where perhaps KWL grids are used?
  4. How do you get children to recognise that their questions are as important as their answers?
  5. How do you structure opportunities for children to ask questions and also give time for responses?
  6. Do you/should you allow children to direct their own learning via questions that are important to them? Should children be allowed to follow their own line of enquiry?
  7. How can you use questions to give pupils more responsibility for their learning?
  8. How can you ensure that children feel confident in asking questions?
  9. What strategies/scaffolds do you have in place for children who are not able to express themselves verbally?
  10. How do you promote an ethos and culture in your classroom that eradicates fear and provides children with a safety net to ask and respond to questions?
  11. How do you respond to questions in a way that honours their risk?
  12. What impact does your ‘default questioning format’ have on children?
  13. How can you empower children to ask questions about their own learning?
  14. Do you feel that the children in your class have the capability to ask higher order questions, or would this need modelled and scaffolded?
  15. What scaffolds are in place to support children with generating their own questions?
  16. How can you use the questions children ask as a form of assessment?
  17. How can the questions children ask show you the gaps in their understanding?
  18. As teachers/TAs should you refer to your students as ‘scientists’/ ‘designers’ / ‘mathematicians’ etc?
  19. As teachers/TAs, how do you make sure that you aren’t only answering/asking questions you know the answer to?

These questions have been generated to assist those reading the above research to fully engage with it so that actions can be taken in your own setting that will affect positive change for pupils.