Dialogic questioning is about focusing closely on one student during questioning to explore a particular concept or set of ideas in depth.
What does it mean?
While question-spreading is useful to encourage participation, sometimes it is valuable to spend some time engaged in extended teacher-student dialogue with one student. This exchange can be significant for the student involved and for the rest of the group, who get to see exploratory, deep thinking modelled by a peer. The hot-seating aspect of this process forces one student to think really deeply about the terminology they use, the connections they make and how they frame their idea. The purpose is to deepen, rather than widen, their thinking, with the teacher scaffolding their thought-process. Hot-seating questions might include: ‘Talk to us about…’
‘Can you explain your thinking?’
‘How is this shown?’,
‘How does this connect to what we were talking about before?’
‘Why…?’ At the
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