Asking effective questions in a logical sequence can boost students’ curiosity, thought processes and overall learning gains without telling them the answers, according to a K-12 Dive article.
But teachers need to be ready to break from planned questions and improvise to guide discussions in the best direction.
Educators can develop questions to determine students’ understanding of material, and they can formulate questions to scaffold learning by applying context to facts or ideas, or to model a certain mode of analysis, says Joe Lampert, executive director of the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Chicago.
Educators also must consider what they’re communicating implicitly through the questions they ask, says Leema Berland, chair of the department of curriculum & instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education. “Let’s see what they want to say,” she says. “That’s communicating that what you’re doing is really important, and it doesn’t have to be exactly the way I was expecting.”
A well-executed series of questions can also motivate students by conveying a combination of excitement and curiosity, says Lampert.
“A question connects students’ prior knowledge and the new knowledge teachers want to engage them with,” he says. Next, align goals in any particular segment of class with the questions to be asked.
Keep a record of questions asked and self-reflect about how students respond, Lampert says. “Pay attention… from an assessment perspective and from a motivational perspective. It’s helpful to have colleagues observing, and feed that back to us as another set of eyes in the room,” he says.
Teachers always do a moment-to-moment “dance” between moving the conversation in the direction they had planned and shifting it in the direction of a student’s thinking, Berland says.
“In the case of science, if you let the kids talk enough, they will challenge each other’s ideas well,” she says. “That opens the space without the teacher saying, ‘No, I want to talk about it this way.’ ”
Figuring out the precise question to ask at any given moment can be tricky, Lampert says.
“If discussion and interaction are an important part of class, we care about not only the specific questions but also how those are sequenced over the class period, and how we adapt based,” he says.
The best strategy sometimes can be to make a claim or assertion and ask students to respond — and give them plenty of time to do so, Lampert says. “Have them do free writing, discuss with a partner or in small groups, and then debrief,” he says. This gives reflection time for students to process and generate their thoughts.
Finding the exact right question depends on the goal of the discussion, and if there’s an upcoming test, the conversation can be more narrowly proscribed, says Berland. In that case, the educator might want to telegraph that the next day’s discussion will be more Socratic.
“Telling the kids what you will be looking for helps them frame it,” she says. “It also helps you, the teacher, remember what your focus is.”
K-12 Dive
