Teachers use questions to engage the students and sustain an ‘active’ style to the learning.
The teacher also uses questions as part of the assessment of learning in order to determine how they best structure, organise and present new learning.
(factual checks – ie ‘Closed’ questions)., where the teacher asks a question and accepts an answer from a volunteer, or selects/conscripts a specific student to answer. These approaches are implicit in any pedagogy, but teachers need a range of ‘Open’ questioning strategies to address different learning needs and situations. Teachers must also pitch questions effectively to raise the thinking challenge, target specific students or groups within the class.
‘Big’ Questions or First Line Questions -
This is a strategy used by teachers to introduce new topics, projects and new areas of learning. It is best to begin thinking with 2 key actions. For example, if introducing the concept of ethical dilemmas and moral choices, we might explore this with the following:
1. Students can share and discuss what they already know about the new topic or concept e.g. “what do you know about behaviour that is right and wrong?”
2. Students are invited to engage with the new topic or concept in response to a Big question e.g. “How do we decide between right and wrong?”
Big Questions promote thinking on a wide ranging scale. These are the most open questions you can ask. These are sometimes referred to as First Line Questions, because there is no ‘bigger’ question you can ask on such a topic e.g. “Are we alone in the universe?” Such thinking can often be used to promote Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural dimensions of learning. First line questions are often associated with spiritual thinking that promotes reflection, consideration of the wider universe and profound thoughts. Such thinking can be inspirational if it enables young people to connect concepts or ideas across different topics or areas of work.
http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/Teaching_Approaches/Questioning
Teachers ask questions for a number of reasons, the most common of which are
- to interest, engage and challenge pupils;
- to check on prior knowledge and understanding;
- to stimulate recall, mobilising existing knowledge and experience in order to create new understanding and meaning;
- to focus pupils’ thinking on key concepts and issues;
- to help pupils to extend their thinking from the concrete and factual to the analytical and evaluative;
- to lead pupils through a planned sequence which progressively establishes key understandings;
- to promote reasoning, problem solving, evaluation and the formulation of hypotheses;
- to promote pupils’ thinking about the way they have learned.
if you want to help pupils develop higher-order thinking skills, you will need to ask more open questions that allow pupils to give a variety of acceptable responses.
Research evidence suggests that effective teachers use a greater number of open questions than less effective teachers.
Questioning is effective when it allows pupils to engage with the learning process by actively composing responses. Research (Borich 1996; Muijs and Reynolds 2001; Morgan and Saxton 1994; Wragg and Brown 2001) suggests that lessons where questioning is effective are likely to have the following characteristics
- Questions are planned and closely linked to the objectives of the lesson.
- The learning of basic skills is enhanced by frequent questions following the exposition of new content that has been broken down into small steps. Each step should be followed by guided practice that provides opportunities for pupils to consolidate what they have learned and that allows teachers to check understanding.
- Closed questions are used to check factual understanding and recall.
- Open questions predominate.
- Sequences of questions are planned so that the cognitive level increases as the questions go on. This ensures that pupils are led to answer questions which demand increasingly higher-order thinking skills but are supported on the way by questions which require less sophisticated thinking skills.
- Pupils have opportunities to ask their own questions and seek their own answers. They are encouraged to provide feedback to each other.
- The classroom climate is one where pupils feel secure enough to take risks, be tentative and make mistakes.
research also demonstrates that most of the questions asked by both effective and less effective teachers are lower order and closed. It is estimated that 70–80 per cent of all learning-focused questions require a simple factual response, whereas only 20–30 per cent lead pupils to explain, clarify, expand, generalise or infer. In other words, only a minority of questions demand that pupils use higher-order thinking skills.
Pupil response is enhanced where
- there is a classroom climate in which pupils feel safe and know they will not be criticised or ridiculed if they give a wrong answer;
- prompts are provided to give pupils confidence to try an answer;
- there is a ‘no-hands’ approach to answering, where you choose the respondent rather than have them volunteer;
- ‘wait time’ is provided before an answer is required. The research suggests that 3 seconds is about right for most questions, with the proviso that more complex questions may need a longer wait time. Research shows that the average wait time in classrooms is about 1 second (Rowe 1986; Borich 1996).
Bloom researched thousands of questions routinely asked by teachers and categorised them. His research, and that of others, suggests that most learning- focused questions asked in classrooms fall into the first two categories, with few questions falling into the other categories which relate to higher-order thinking skills
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