Questioning in the classroom can be scary...

Does questioning stimulate thinking leading to students taking responsibility for their own learning?
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Although questioning by the teacher can prompt good thinking and responses, it may also be the reason for students not becoming more independent...

Not all students think the same way. Teacher questioning does challenge students, many of who find it hard it is to find the right words, to explain.

Highly effective questioning

​We speak of highly effective questioning being about quality rather than quantity and that asking questions elicits deep thinking and provides valuable insights to the teacher about students’ thinking... right?

How about the non-verbal child who just cannot articulate the answer or the child whose language skills are very weak.... what happens to their confidence?
Should we be speaking about highly personalized questioning with a dash of empathy?

Is deep questioning always effective if the aim is to promote and think?

Questioning as an assessment tool

Questioning could be used as an assessment tool to elicit student thinking about knowledge and to provide the teacher evidence on whether the students have grasped how to apply the acquired knowledge, providing them an opportunity to clarify ambiguity or indeed providing a challenge for further research.

Great teachers empathetically elicit responses from all students using tempered and meaningful questions specifically targeted at the student.

No doubt, questioning as a tool can promote deep, connected, and elaborate thinking. Questions can prompt students to explain and justify their answers, improve an initial response, describe their thinking processes, elaborate on their answers, and explore implications, ‘what-ifs, and connections with other ideas and knowledge.

This is an accurate assessment of the outcome.

This is also the opportunity - or the first step - which motivates students to engage in further independent learning and inquiry.

Oracy and Dialogue

Although we have used the word ‘questioning,’ there is a range of activities that teachers use to promote oracy and dialogue, inspiring the learner to generate explanations, and it is this inspiration that facilitates deep learning because this encourages the learner to connect new knowledge to existing personal knowledge and work independently.

Asking meaningful and appropriate questions that target essential learning is a starting point and should be followed by subsequent inspiring actions leading to students producing evidence of learning.
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This motivated independence that follows makes questioning a helpful tool and distinguishes it from a test or exam approach to learning.

Dr. Tassos Anastasiades