Teachers ask questions. Lots of them. We ask questions for a number of reasons, whether to check for understanding, to deepen understanding or to retrieve and strengthen prior knowledge.
Here are six things to bear in mind about questions:
Teacher tips for asking questions
1. Open versus closed questions
There’s a misconception that open questions are better than closed questions. However, closed questions have their place - eg, in checking knowledge. If you want to check specifically whether your pupils can recall the date of the Battle of Bannockburn, then a closed question will work better than a more open question. A more open question could then be used to probe further.
2. Mini-whiteboards
We often use questioning to check for understanding after introducing some new knowledge or teaching a new skill. If we want to check for understanding, we can direct a question at a pupil and use their answer as a proxy for judging whether the whole class have understood the new material. However, this is quite an assumption. A better plan is to use mini-whiteboards (MWBs) to allow you to check the understanding of the whole class. A question can be posed, and pupils then display answers on the MWBs. This allows you to probe further with pupils who have answered both correctly and incorrectly.
3. Cold calling
Cold calling is a good technique to use to increase participation when asking questions. Instead of pupils volunteering answers by raising their hand, target questions at pupils. Hint: say the pupil’s name last. If you say, “Iona, what is the molecular formula of methane?”, the rest of the class can relax after you say “Iona”. Instead, say, “What is the molecular formula of methane...Iona?”
4. Wait time
Often we don’t give enough wait time between asking a question and providing the answer ourselves or moving on to ask another pupil. Give students a good amount of time to formulate an answer - eg, approximately 10 seconds for a closed question, or up to 30 seconds for a more open question. Remember, if you are going over answers to a quiz or any other situation where pupils should have an answer written in front of them, then there should be no need to increase wait time.
5. Challenge
We want to be sure that our questions keep our students in the struggle zone, so make sure that there is challenge. For example, don’t accept partially correct answers or poorly worded answers - ask the pupil to provide more detail, to reword their answer. “I don’t know” is a perfectly plausible answer, but it shouldn’t be seen as a way of avoiding the cognitive challenge of answering a question. If a pupil says “I don’t know” then, after eliciting the correct answer from another pupil, return to the original pupil and get them to verabalise the answer.
6. Process questions
Ask pupils to explain their thought process after answering a question - eg, “Arfah, can you explain how you worked that out?” This can promote metacognition and allows you, as the teacher, to get a glimpse of pupils’ thought processes - for correct and incorrect answers.
Dr Colin McGill is a lecturer in teacher education - specialising in chemistry - and PGDE (professional graduate diploma in education) programme leader at Edinburgh Napier University
