Teacher-Directed Questioning

Some of my students don’t feel comfortable responding to my questions/prompts. You may find that some students are reticent to put forth answers to questions/prompts in a discussion setting. This can keep these students from being active, engaged learners and make your discussion section less inclusive.

• Provide discussion questions/prompts ahead of time. Put up your questions/prompts online, or send them out via email. This allows reticent students to prepare and feel more comfortable participating in section. (Plus, students can use these questions as a review guide later.)

• Write key material on the board or provide a handout. By reducing the amount of note-taking students feel the need to do, you increase the amount of attention they can direct towards the discussion. You can also use this to provide a baseline conceptual structure to the relevant topics.

• Give students time to think. Be comfortable with silence. Students, especially those less comfortable with open discussion, won’t always be ready with a response as soon as you finish laying out a prompt or question. Even enthusiastic students can need time to think through new material. Even allowing just 10-15 seconds before letting anyone answer can give more students a chance to get involved. If you’re writing key material on the board, writing questions/prompts on the board can naturally create this time buffer.

• Provide multiple ways to respond. This can be done by creating additional response modes outside of your discussion section: creating an online forum where students can write out and post their responses, creating meeting times for students to discuss questions/prompts in a one-on-one setting, and so on. But it can also be done by making clear to students how many shapes a useful response can take: signaling a point of confusion, asking you or another student to rephrase something just said, trying to restate a claim or position just put forth in order to check understanding, and so on.

Some of my students dominate the responses. You may find that some of your students are more comfortable and more enthusiastic about providing answers to your questions/prompts. This is not bad in itself, but, if unchecked, it can prevent less comfortable (oftentimes already marginalized) students from getting involved, and thus make your discussion section less inclusive.

• Gently intervene and invite less comfortable students to respond. You can direct discussion opportunities towards less comfortable students without reprimanding or otherwise discouraging a more comfortable student. Try qualifying invitations to respond by using phrases like, “Let’s hear from someone who hasn’t had a chance to respond yet,” or asking other students to respond to points made by the more comfortable students (thus giving the more comfortable students credit for their contributions, but also giving time and space for the less comfortable to make a contribution of their own).

• Establish inclusive discussion participation norms. Explicitly and implicitly work to create and enforce discussion practices that allow all students to feel comfortable getting involved. This can be done through relatively commonplace practices like hand-raising (allowing you to call on less comfortable students) and avoiding interrupting and talking over others. But you can also use specialized classroom discussion norms: evaluate positions and not people, wait 10-15 seconds before answering, and so on. Consider taking time to explicitly go over the discussion section expectations and practices with students.

Students are responding only/mostly to me, and not to one another. As the name suggests, Teacher-Directed Questioning puts you, the teacher, at the center of the discussion. This strategy can lead to many student-teacher-student or teacher-student-teacher interactions while constraining the number of student-student interactions.

• Combine Teacher-Led Questioning with other strategies. Make Teacher-Led Questioning only part of the agenda in a given section. For example, follow up the questioning by breaking into small group discussions. Different activities can shake up classroom social structure, functionally removing you from the immediate section interaction, and thus force students to rely on their peers more.

• Explicitly incorporate students’ responses into your own responses. When students turn to you for information and feedback, explicitly rely on questions and answers put forth by other students: collect questions/answers on the board or in an online document, use students’ questions, answers, and particular phrasing to frame discussion topics, call out and connect related points made by distinct students, and so on. Even if you are, functionally speaking, at the center of the discussion, you can still make the discussion clearly student-driven. Also, whenever possible, try to give students explicit credit for their contributions.