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Skilful questioning: The beating heart of good pedagogy

Written By: Jonathan Doherty
5 min read

Questions are an integral part of classroom life and essential to every teacher’s pedagogical repertoire. Questioning serves many purposes: it engages students in the learning process and provides opportunities for students to ask questions themselves. It challenges levels of thinking and informs whether students are ready to progress with their learning. Questions that probe for deeper meaning foster critical thinking skills, as well as higher-order capabilities such as problem-solving. Paramore (Paramore, 2017) identifies an imbalance of questions often found in teaching, saying there is a dominance of teacher talk and an over-reliance on closed questions, providing only limited assessment for learning (AfL) information for a teacher. The issue then is how classroom questioning strategies can become more effective.

What the research says

The value of classroom questioning is well documented. Research tends to focus on the relationship between teachers’ questions and student achievement. Here are some of the important messages:

Types of questions used

Too often, questions from teachers are organisational, such as ‘What do we always put at the top of our page to begin with?’ or instructional in nature, such as ‘Who can tell me what an adjective is?’. Wragg’s early study (Wragg, 1993) found teachers commonly use three types of question:

  1. Management-related, e.g.‘Has everyone finished this piece of work now?’
  2. Information recall-related, e.g.‘How many sides does a quadrilateral have?’
  3. Higher-order questions, e.g.‘What evidence do you have for saying that?’

In Wragg’s study, 57 per cent of questions were management-related, 37 per cent required information recall and only eight per cent challenged higher-order thinking.

Closed or convergent questions have low cognitive involvement and result in limited answers such as ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Open or divergent questions encourage greater expansion in answers and promote better classroom dialogue (Tofade et al., 2013). Closed questions are still important, however, and help assist in knowledge retrieval; but proceed with caution here, as the inevitable one-word student answers limit classroom dialogue. In order to maximise AfL in lessons, use different types of questions but limit the procedural and emphasise questions that centre on learning.

Timing

Student wait time (giving a brief period of time for students to think or reflect before answering) has a positive effect on learning. Brooks and Brooks (Brooks and Brooks, 2001) found that a rapid-fire questioning approach fails to provide teachers with accurate information about student understanding. Typically, the time between asking a question and a student’s response is about one second. Cohen et al. (Cohen et al., 2004) recommend wait times of three to five seconds for closed questions and up to 15 seconds for open-ended questions.

Cognitive levels

Complex questions promote complex thinking, argue researchers Degener and Berne (Degener and Berne, 2016). But is it really that simple? Samson et al. (Samson et al., 1987) found that higher cognitive questioning strategies have a positive effect on learning, but this was not as large as has been previously suggested. Low-level questioning aimed at recall and fundamental-level comprehension is vital, but can plateau classroom learning. Higher-level questions can produce deeper learning and thinking, but a balance needs to be struck. Both have a place and a mixture of questions is recommended.

Effective approaches

Over the years, classification taxonomies have been developed to guide teacher questioning. Perhaps the most well-known questioning framework is Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy (Bloom, 1956), later revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (Anderson et al., 2001). This framework covers six different types of question, which will all have uses in the classroom at different points and for different purposes:

  • Knowledge, ‘Can you remember…?’
  • Comprehension, ‘Tell me how this works…’
  • Application, ‘Where else have you seen this pattern?’
  • Analysis, ‘Explain to me what is happening here.’
  • Synthesis, ‘What conclusions can you draw from this?’
  • Evaluation, ‘Can you measure how effective this is?’

Trigger words are an effective way to formulate questions, as shown in Table 1.

TRIGGER WORDS LINKED TO BLOOM’S TAXONOMY

Ideas to try in the classroom

There are many questioning tactics to choose from to promote learning:

  1. No hands up. Anyone can answer, which avoids the same few students answering questions.
  2. In the hot seat. Students take it in turns to sit in the ‘hot seat’ and answer questions.
  3. Ask the expert. The teacher puts questions to a student on a given topic, extending this to encourage other students to ask questions.
  4. Ask the classroom. The teacher displays a number of written questions to stimulate thinking about pictures or objects in the classroom.
  5. Think-pair-share. This allows time to share ideas with a partner and respond to a posed question.
  6. Phone a friend. This is a useful strategy in which a student nominates another to answer the teacher’s question. The first student also provides an answer.
  7. Eavesdropping. When groups are working, the teacher circulates around the classroom and poses questions to groups based on what is heard in their discussions.
  8. Question box. An actual box has a series of questions in it devised by the teacher. Time is set aside at the end of a week to choose some to discuss as a class.
  9. Here is the answer, what is the question? This is deliberately back to front to encourage out-of-the-box thinking.
  10. More than me. The teacher asks a student a question and deliberately cuts short the answer to involve another student to build on this answer.

Shirley Clarke’s website has a wide range of practical resources on proven questioning strategies.

Things to take into account

Using a variety of question types can transform your classroom into a ‘questioning classroom’. A classroom ethos and organisation with enquiry at its heart is an effective one, where purposeful talk dominates and teachers ask fewer questions. Dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2017) uses skilled questions to extend thinking, where answers to teachers’ questions are built on rather than merely received.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • Is my classroom a ‘questioning classroom’?
  • What types of questions and how many questions do I typically ask in my teaching?
  • Do some questions I ask target higher-order thinking and raise the cognitive stakes? Is this true of my teaching across all subjects?

 

Stephen Lockyer’s book Hands Up: Questions to Ignite Thinking in the Classroom is full of practical tips.

References

Alexander R (2017) Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk. 5th ed. Cambridge: Dialogos.

Anderson L, Krathwohl D, Airasian P, et al. (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.

Bloom B (ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Company, Inc.

Brooks J and Brooks M (2001) Becoming a Constructive Teachers. Costa A (ed.). Developing Minds: A Resource Book for Teaching Thinking. Alexandria, VA: Ass.

Cohen L, Manion L and Morrison K (2004) A Guide to Teaching Practice. London: Routledge.

Degener S and Berne J (2016) Complex questions promote complex thinking. The Reading Teacher, International Literacy Association70(5): 595–599.

Paramore J (2017) Questioning to stimulate dialogue. In: Paige R, Lambert S, and Geeson R (eds) Building Skills for Effective Primary Teaching. London: Learning Matters, pp. 125–142.

Samson G, Strykowski B, Weinstein T, et al. (1987) The effects of teacher questioning levels on student achievement. The Journal of Educational Research80(5): 290–295.

Tofade T, Elsner J and Haines S (2013) Best practice strategies for effective use of questions as a teaching tool. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education77(7): 155.

Wragg E (1993) Questioning in the Primary Classroom. London: Routledge.

 

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