Questioning has been used for millennia to help assess student learning. The art of Questioning is often overlooked, and a lot of classroom questions can be management related or simple information recall. While these forms of questioning are important, by asking more open-ended questions and giving students 3, 5, or even 15 seconds to formulate an answer can provide valuable data regarding individual or group learning.

Questioning can help teachers:

• Adjust difficulty in real-time, boosting confidence of the students to answer

• Vary a lesson by including open-ended, or discussion prompting questions

• Gather immediate data to help steer a lesson or unit

• Think-pair-share. Allows time to share ideas with a partner and respond to a posed question.

• Phone a friend. A useful strategy in which a student nominates another to answer the teacher’s question. The first student also provides an answer.

• Question box. An actual box has a series of questions devised by the teacher. Time is set aside at the end of a week to choose some to discuss as a class.

• Here is the answer, what is the question? Deliberately back to front to encourage out-of-the-box thinking.

Questioning styles taken from Impact Journal.