Questioning

Purpose:

Effective questioning will maximize each student's engagement during a lesson by posing questions to promote critical thinking and discussion.  Critical thinking skills and conceptual development are supported through incorporating multiple questioning strategies and varying the types of questions.  Questioning is an important teaching skill that occurs during lecture, lab inquiry, and small group sessions, which allows you to quickly gather information about student misconceptions and understanding.

• Closed questions have one correct answer and most are at the level of remember, understand, or apply.  

• Open questions have multiple good answers and most are at a level that require the student to analyze, evaluate, or create.

Why should we care about questioning?

• To actively involve all students

• To increase motivation or interest

• To develop critical thinking skills

• To review previous lessons

• To assess progress towards goals and objectives

• To stimulate independent thinking and learning

Establish Classroom Procedures:

• Emphasize the importance of each student thinking and reflecting as questions are posed throughout a lesson, lab, or group activity.

• As an effective teacher, allow ample "wait time" after a question is posed.  Silently count to 5 to allow your students processing time for the question.  The depth and length of the students' response will drastically increase. 

• Establish a safe culture by allowing students to opt out of answering in the moment.  Allow them to say "Please come back to me." after a question is posed but always remember to return to that student to get their thoughts.

Strategies:

Questioning Taxonomy Charts

• • utilize these as you look for different levels of questioning during a lesson, lecture, or lab.  There are several online that incorporate Bloom's or Webb's.  Below are links to 6 levels of questions that are a Bloom's and Webb hybrid:

    • Remember

    • Understand

    • Apply

    • Analyze

    • Evaluate

    • Create

No Opt Out

• • require all students to answer questions posed to them even if it means coming back to them.  If they prefer for you to "Please come back to me", always come back to them even if it is to reiterate another students response. 

 Think-Ink-Pair-Share

• • Give individuals a specific time (1-2 minutes) to think and write individually.

  • Then allow them to discuss and edit their responses with a shoulder partner, lab group, etc...

  • Last the teacher leads a whole-class discussion, clarifying, posing additional questions, looking for misconceptions, etc...

Discussion Questions

• • incorporate/embed questions into lecture to increase student engagement and thinking.  

Quads 

• Place students in groups of 5.  

• Give each student a quads reproducible

• After reading, listening to lecture, or viewing a video students create 4 higher level questions about the content that they learn.  They are the author.  Once written they cut out the 4 squares an give them to the 4 other students in their group to answer.  The other students in the group of 5 do the same.  They sign as Author #2 on the squares they write answers on.