Questioning to enhance learning

Effective questioning as a deliberate strategy can enhance learners’ thinking skills, provide opportunities for exploration of possibilities, help them make meaning and challenge them to apply this understanding in complex ways within their world(VanTassel-Baska, 2014 cited in Handa, 2015).

Subject content areas need to be valued and remain a common starting point for students unless their prior knowledge exhibits a mastery of it (typical of highly capable students). It is argued that the best way to do this is cognitively, and one of the best ways to do this is through the skill of questioning.

We need to continue to create through learning experiences the types of thinking that are necessary and engage our students, by doing this, through the content of our subject areas, we develop their understanding and support them to use this to higher-order processes recognised as critical to each student’s learning development.

There are many questioning models that can be implemented even when working remotely . The first unpacked is the framing of questions for the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Whilst in remote settings the targeting of specific thinking processes through relevant verbs and questions can be supported by the inclusion of the question stems found above. The question stems can be used to create deeper complexity and abstractness, supporting the needs of highly capable students as they address the outcomes applicable to each subject area. This can be embedded within learning experiences that are delivered and used to collect evidence of learning along with increasing the student’s capacity to demonstrate higher order thinking skills.