Questioning Techniques

When teachers ask questions, they are not only checking for comprehension, encouraging reflection, stimulating thought, but they are also modeling one of the essential skills of good teaching and learning. Questions help students construct knowledge. "Some cognitive scientists think that questions are so important that we cannot learn until the right one has been asked: if memory does not ask the question, it will not know where to index the answer. The more questions we ask, the more ways we can index a thought in memory. Better indexing produces greater flexibility, easier recall, and richer understanding" (Bain, 2004, p. 31).