Effective Questioning
Questions instigate learning and thinking
Closed Questions - a question with one right answer. If you want to know what the pupils’ knowledge is, ask a closed question
Open Questions - one that prompts pupils to keep talking, like ‘What more can you tell me?’ or ‘What do you mean by…?’
If you want to probe pupil understanding, ask an open question. Consider Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Think about staging your questions
Some teachers use closed questions first to put pupils into a context for thinking. Then they use open questions to probe and deepen the pupils’ understanding in that context. Think ahead, and be clear about the purpose of questioning. What are the pupils meant to be getting out of the next question?
Wait time or Thinking time
Give pupils time to think. Although in some ways this strategy aims to enhance the quality of answers rather than questions, increasing pupils’ thinking time also gives you an opportunity to ask different kinds of questions.
Research suggests that teachers typically restrict their ‘wait time’ to 1–3 seconds. The problem is that this only really gives pupils time to recall old learning, not to construct new learning. Allowing around five seconds of wait time means that you can ask more probing questions.
Avoid ‘shotgun’ questioning
Ask questions one at a time, rather than firing off a barrage of them in quick succession. Remember that a proportion of pupils may suffer from slow speech processing, which means that it takes them longer to make sense of what we say. Quick fire questions can cause pupils to go reptilian and may persuade them to tune out.
Use ‘no hands up’
This is a great way to extend participation to the whole class during questioning, rather than having the same few pupils answer most or all of your questions. Pupils do not indicate that they have an answer; instead, you choose somebody to provide one. This prevents the tendency for some pupils to stop thinking when others’ hands go up! Be selective about when to use ’no hands up’, however, to ensure that it builds on your current practice rather than replacing it.
Pupil questioning
Encourage pupils to ask their own questions.
Juicy Questions
It can be very productive to have pupils ask and respond to each other’s questions. One very useful tip is to focus their attention on how ‘juicy’ their questions are. This is just a pupil-friendly way of describing open questions: ‘juicier’ questions are those with answers that kick-start further discussion rather than closing it down.
Closed Questions - a question with one right answer. If you want to know what the pupils’ knowledge is, ask a closed question
Open Questions - one that prompts pupils to keep talking, like ‘What more can you tell me?’ or ‘What do you mean by…?’
If you want to probe pupil understanding, ask an open question. Consider Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Think about staging your questions
Some teachers use closed questions first to put pupils into a context for thinking. Then they use open questions to probe and deepen the pupils’ understanding in that context. Think ahead, and be clear about the purpose of questioning. What are the pupils meant to be getting out of the next question?
Wait time or Thinking time
Give pupils time to think. Although in some ways this strategy aims to enhance the quality of answers rather than questions, increasing pupils’ thinking time also gives you an opportunity to ask different kinds of questions.
Research suggests that teachers typically restrict their ‘wait time’ to 1–3 seconds. The problem is that this only really gives pupils time to recall old learning, not to construct new learning. Allowing around five seconds of wait time means that you can ask more probing questions.
Avoid ‘shotgun’ questioning
Ask questions one at a time, rather than firing off a barrage of them in quick succession. Remember that a proportion of pupils may suffer from slow speech processing, which means that it takes them longer to make sense of what we say. Quick fire questions can cause pupils to go reptilian and may persuade them to tune out.
Use ‘no hands up’
This is a great way to extend participation to the whole class during questioning, rather than having the same few pupils answer most or all of your questions. Pupils do not indicate that they have an answer; instead, you choose somebody to provide one. This prevents the tendency for some pupils to stop thinking when others’ hands go up! Be selective about when to use ’no hands up’, however, to ensure that it builds on your current practice rather than replacing it.
Pupil questioning
Encourage pupils to ask their own questions.
Juicy Questions
It can be very productive to have pupils ask and respond to each other’s questions. One very useful tip is to focus their attention on how ‘juicy’ their questions are. This is just a pupil-friendly way of describing open questions: ‘juicier’ questions are those with answers that kick-start further discussion rather than closing it down.